J.J. Abrams’ Bad Robot is making an adaptation of Stephen King’s Billy Summers
Stephen King's book is about a hitman initially posing as a writer
Aux News Billy Summers
It feels like a weirdly long time since we got a new Stephen King adaptation, but it’s actually been less than six months since the Adrien Brody-starring Chapelwaite premiered on Epix… and six months also happens to be the length of time it’s been since King published his last book, Billy Summers, and—get this—it’s now getting adapted into a TV show. The circle of life!
The adaptation is coming from J.J. Abrams’ Bad Robot and writers Ed Zwick and Marshall Herskovitz, with Zwick directing. That’s according to Deadline, which says the project will be a limited series that will be “six to 10 episodes” long. Deadline also says it will soon be shopped around to “high-end cable networks and streamers.” That probably means they’re aiming a little higher than Epix (no offense to Epix), but Bad Robot’s King stuff has usually gone to Hulu—save for last year’s Lisey’s Story on Apple TV+.
Billy Summers, which was written at the rise of the COVID-19 pandemic and seemingly touches on some of King’s thoughts about isolation, is about a hitman hired to observe and execute a potential witness against big criminal. The book has a well-regarded first half, during which Billy must pose a novelist, if you can believe that in a Stephen King book, but things get weirder and wilder after he accomplishes his assassination gig and the book takes some turns in its second half.
It’ll be interesting to see how or if the Bad Robot team decides to shake things up in the story, since the general consensus is that the first half is really good and that the second half is also there, but the Deadline story doesn’t have any other details about what to expect from the TV version of Billy Summers (including casting). It’s apparently moving fast, though, so maybe we’ll know more soon.
5 Comments
As someone who read King pretty heavily during their teenage years and just kind of…stopped around the last Dark Tower book, it’s weird to think that there’s probably dozens and dozens of his books that I just haven’t read.
I did read 11/22/1963 and thought it was pretty good, but I have no idea where I would start with latter-day King if I wanted to pick it back up again.
Also, On Writing is great and if you haven’t read it you should do so.
I also quit King after The Dark Tower. I couldn’t (and still can’t) believe how much he fucked up those last three books. It actually soured me to his whole catalogue because after hinting at it for 30 years the last book canonically denies that there’s a shared universe at all, just shitting on the whole thing. All King’s non-DT books are recontextualized as fiction within the fictional universe. This seems clever for about five seconds until you realize there’s no reason to have done it that way except as a cop-out to avoid having to tie anything together.It’s hard to enjoy Insomnia any more when I know all the Dark Tower-y stuff in it is complete bunk. The DT characters literally find a copy and determine that it was put there by the bad guys to fool them with its false information. I guess it’s good that they didn’t read it, because they would have expected to meet a Crimson King who was cool and interesting and powerful.Excuse this outburst. I swear I could do a whole six hour Plinkett thing about this shit
I loved the books and disagree, but absolutely loved your outburst and would enjoy buying you a drink
Billy Summers is his best since 11/22/63 so read it. These comments are always full of ” I don’t read King anymore”. He is on streak right now of very good books.
The book has a well-regarded first half, during which Billy must pose [as] a novelist“Oh, this? That’s just a really long pencil. I like to write longhand, you see”