Jason Bateman, who directed the first two episodes and also executive-produced the whole series, is more concerned with examining and showing those matters of duality than with explaining whether or not Terry did it. How can someone be in two places at once and how can two arguably irrefutable, mutually exclusive pieces of evidence both be true? How could a pillar of the community be accused of murder, and how could a detective with a great track record have serious lingering doubts about a man he was so sure was guilty? The only problem is that there’s just as much convincing physical and eyewitness evidence that Terry was 70 miles away at a teachers’ conference at the time of the murder. Ralph has good reason to suspect Maitland: multiple witnesses put him at the scene, and Terry’s DNA is all over both the crime scene and another getaway van. After people find Frankie’s body, Detective Ralph Anderson ( Ben Mendelsohn) determines that local high school English teacher and Little League coach Terry Maitland (Jason Bateman) is responsible. While the show mercifully spares the audience of the gory details of the inciting crime at its center, The Outsider is still plenty dark, both metaphorically and literally. Someone has brutally assaulted and murdered preteen Frankie Peterson.

CSI: Georgia Jason Bateman in ‘The Outsider.’ The Outsider, at least in its first two episodes, is one of the better King adaptations of the last few years. Those who haven’t read the novel might wonder when the show is going to pick up, but those experiencing King Fatigue need not worry. So far, the show leans heavily on the procedural elements. King’s novel is part police procedural and part supernatural horror. In the HBO adaptation of The Outsider, that great good hasn’t showed up yet, at least not in the first two episodes. In his 2018 novel The Outsider, King doubles down on that theme until he blows it wide open, creating a world where supernatural bad commingles with a great good. Horrific creatures are nothing compared with the banality of pure human evil. Stephen King’s work has long been concerned with the concept that the worst horrors in the world are the everyday atrocities we commit against one another.

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