Ben Watches Television : The Outsider - "Tigers & Bears"

In the penultimate episode of The Outsider, our investigation team is now trying to keep Claude (Paddy Considine)’s ears virgin of El Cuco developments because they’re now aware that it’s channeling into him and spying on his every interaction, so they send him on a fried chicken run along with everyone’s favorite useless attorney Howard Solomon (Bill Camp). There’s also a parallel story occurring in 1947, where local kids get lost in the same cave where El Cuco wanted to murder that kid, last week. Once again, everything seems like a big setup for next week.

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Stephen King doesn’t have a great track record for interesting film of television adaptations.

Adaptations of his work usually fail because they’re underproduced. For the longest time, cinema and television didn’t have the technology or the financial means to live up to King’s imaginary. They ended up corny and cheap-looking. The Outsider is the opposite, though. It’s failing because it is insanely overproduced. HBO has given this show WAY too much budget, running-time and big name collaborators for its own good. Everyone involved is so obsessed with the idea of making "important television” that no one is willing to actually pull the trigger.

Tigers & Bears was the second Dennis Lehane-penned episode. It’s marginally better than In the Pines, In the Pines, but it’s another unnecessary step between the big reveal in episode 6 and the impending final confrontation. The show is all out of creative solutions to buy time that it is becoming a parody of itself. In Tigers & Bears, there’s a scene where Seale Bolton (Max Beesley) - a character who doesn’t exist in the novel - lights up a fat blunt and suddenly becomes an El Cuco expert before reverting back to being a complete idiot again. It’s surreal.

That moment was aggressively stupid. What the fuck was that supposed to be about? Is weed supposed to wake up a primal man’s hunter-gatherer instincts? I want whatever Seale’s smoking if it’s going to make him a genius like that. Between that, Claude going out for fried chicken and Seale telling his brother about the El Cuco plans because he “has his bro’s back”, Tigers & Bears was filled with cheap character moments that felt out of place. In the novel, Claude is traveling to his visit his elderly mother instead, which is great because she’s less involved that his idiot brother.

The episode had its moments, though. I mean, the parallel storyline served an obvious purpose but Lehane withheld enough information to keep it interesting until it ran its course. The kids were wandering in the cave and it was unclear what was going to happen to them. I expected El Cuco to show up and devour their faces at any moment, but he didn’t. Tigers & Bears is another episode where we barely see him, but in the case of this ancestral haunt story…. it kind of works? It grounded the supernatural nature of the show into a realistic tragedy, which made sense.

Now that The Outsider is winding down, it is becoming clear that it shouldn’t have been given a 10-episodes run. Eight would’ve been fine. Perhaps even six. The show is telling a fun and original story but everything is so bloated and grandiloquent only to invariably end with a closeup of Ben Mendelsohn rolling his eyes and sighing at no one is particular. Not all of you know how it ends already, but I’m sure you’ve guessed it involves caves and Jack Hoskins (Marc Mencacha) fucking around in the woods some more. That cliffhanger at the end was nice, though.

But I’m ready for this show to be over.