Best in Arts & Entertainment 2020: The Outsider (TV)

by Nathan Ligon | Dec 15, 2020 | TV | 0 comments

#20. The Outsider (Television, HBO)

Since the popularity of Andy Muschietti’s ‘It’ remake shot Stephen King stories back into the motion picture stratosphere with a vengeance, there have been a plethora of new movies and shows to grace screens around the globe. The latest to hit television screens this year is a murder mystery with an interesting twist. How can a murderer be in two places at one time?

The first episode of this creepy detective drama sets up that exact premise, and the rest of the show unravels exactly how that might be possible. The always reliable Ben Mendelsohn plays the detective on the case and Jason Bateman plays the beloved father who appears to have viciously murdered a little boy. We watch the clues and video evidence get put together before our very eyes and somehow still can’t believe it’s true. Then alternate video places our murder suspect over a hundred miles away at the exact same time.

This picture doesn’t start To come together until Academy Award nominee Cynthia Erivo shows up as a very intuitive private Detective and that’s as much as I’m going to give away. HBO struck narrative gold a few years back with ‘True Detective’ and many have been trying desperately to recreate it for years. This is the closest a show has one to getting that feeling, while truly being its own thing. And the influence of Stephen King is all over the DNA of this show. Which is probably why I enjoyed it so damn much.

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Nathan Ligon

Film / Theater / Music Critic at Red Carpet Crash

The son of Executive Producer Jon Ligon, Nathan has spent his life in the company of filmmakers and some of the best musicians in Dallas, TX. He has since become a highly viewed critic and short filmmaker for Red Carpet Crash and Shot & Cut Films.