Note: Warner Bros. Home Entertainment provided me with a free copy of the Blu-Ray I reviewed in this blog post. The opinions I share are my own.

Stephen King is world-renowned for his darkly fantastical horror tales. That makes it all the more impressive that his newest tale in the HBO series The Outsider could use those fantastical elements to explore the disturbingly mundane horrors of modern America.

Part of the credit for that exploration goes to show runner Richard Price, a television writer known primarily for his work on gritty crime series like The Wire, The Night Of, and The Deuce. Price seems like an odd choice for a Stephen King monster series, but it is exactly his attention to real-life detail and character that makes this series work so effectively.

The story begins when family man Terry Maitland (played by Ozark’s Jason Bateman, who was also a director and producer on this series) is arrested for the brutal murder of a young boy. The case takes a shocking turn for the family and the police when seemingly ironclad video evidence surfaces showing that Terry was hundreds of miles away at the time of the crime.

To divulge the direction of the story from there is to rob viewers of one of the great slow burn TV viewing experiences of 2019. Everyone is operating in top form for this show, from Price and King to the episodes’ directors (including the truly talented Karyn Kusama) to the uniformly excellent cast. Ben Mendelsohn takes a break from the blockbuster roles in Marvel and Star Wars to inhabit the broken and exhausted Detective Ralph Anderson, emotionally unprepared to deal with the murder of a child so soon after the death of his own son. But the most mesmerizing performance here is Cynthia Erivo, recently Oscar nominated for Harriet and utterly compelling as the gifted but socially inept investigator Holly Gibney.

The series flits back and forth between bona fide monster movie and character-driven investigative procedural, and each is more effective because of the other’s presence. The central monster of the story, dubbed El Cuco by Erivo’s investigator, is a mostly-unseen menace, lurking at the edges of the story and witnessed primarily through the chaos and sadness it leaves in its wake.

It is this creature’s existence and its methods that perfectly frame the theme of this series: the broken nature of humanity’s systems. From the legal system that wrongly jailed innocent people for horrifying crimes, to the belief systems that never prepared these believers for the existence of a creature like El Cuco, this ten-episode series is a constant, quiet reminder that the systems we construct to protect ourselves often end up being worse than what we felt we needed protection from in the first place.

It is also a political show, in an unobtrusive but important way. The show lets its audience notice the details needed to see systemic injustices at work: the casting alone reminds us that a white man can be cleared of the same false accusations that send a black man and a Hispanic woman to jail for life. The American penal system, this series tells us, is as broken as every other system man has created.

But the show’s monster, El Cuco, brings a more horrifying truth to light. His desire isn’t just to kill and survive. He wants to create cycles of misery that continue ever outward, enveloping families and communities in the pain and punishment. El Cuco kills the way he does so that others will be punished for his crimes. For every life he ends, five more are upended and shattered. He has seen the brokenness in our systems, and he is using it to thrive.

The series is beautifully shot, and the Blu-Ray perfectly captures their series’ focus on the lonely and empty spaces in nature. From half-lit caves to sun-dappled forest clearings, the Blu-Ray displays every frame as a struggle of light and shadow.

This quietly devastating ten-part series is a haunting tale of monsters and the systems that feed them. It is satisfying in multiple ways: as a story of a grieving father finding some level of peace with the loss of his child; as a monster story whose tone is pitched just realistically enough that the fear it incites comes equally from the unknown and the all-too-familiar.

And most of all, it is a reminder about the systems we create to protect ourselves, the ones we convince ourselves are protecting us from the monsters. The real monsters know those systems better than we ever could, and they love watching us use them against each other.

The Outsider: The Complete First Season is available on digital, Blu-Ray, and DVD on July 28th.

Website: HBO: The Outsider

Based on the best-selling novel by Stephen King.

The 10-episode series follows police detective Ralph Anderson (Ben Mendelsohn), as he sets out to investigate the mutilated body of 11-year-old Frankie Peterson found in the Georgia woods. The mysterious circumstances surrounding this horrifying crime leads Ralph, still grieving the recent death of his own son, to bring in unorthodox private investigator Holly Gibney (Cynthia Erivo), whose uncanny abilities he hopes will help explain the unexplainable.

The cast includes Ben Mendelsohn, Cynthia Erivo, Bill Camp, Mare Winningham, Paddy Considine, Julianne Nicholson, Yul Vázquez, Jeremy Bobb and Marc Menchaca.