TV GUIDE: The Guide to Weekend TV: Sundance's Appropriate Adult, A Bag of Bones, and More!
Dec 9, 2011
by Matt Roush
... Long-buried crimes also figure into A&E's two-part adaptation of Stephen King's Bag of Bones (Sunday-Monday, 9/8c), which serves as a reminder that the best hauntings are the simplest. In this updating of King's 1998 romantic ghost story, a grieving widower (Pierce Brosnan) gets messages from beyond on his smart phone, his laptop, even his iPad. But the moment with the most impact is when he notices that something is rearranging the magnetized letters on his fridge door. A classic King touch: the fantastic within the ordinary.
This is a far cry from the ridiculously lurid supernatural shenanigans churning the bloody waters every week on FX's American Horror Story, with its shock-for-shock's-sake graphic overkill going so far over the top that it becomes more silly than scary. If Horror Story evokes cringes and giggles, I'm afraid Bag of Bones goes too far to the opposite extreme of the spooky spectrum and provokes mostly yawns, once it becomes overly obvious why the spirits are being so persistent. Shouldn't there be some middle ground (like in the classics of Henry James and Shirley Jackson) where the ghosts don't spell everything out? Maybe next time.
In Bones, Brosnan stands in for King (with in-jokes about Misery and his Richard Bachman alter ego), playing a best-selling novelist who retreats to a New England lake house after his beloved wife's sudden death. Creatively blocked and besieged by nightmares and visions, usually of little girls being drowned, he soon becomes a pawn in a custody battle involving a single mom (Melissa George) and the town's decrepit old Mr. Potter caricature (William Schallert, having a ball). There's a local curse afoot, which must have something to do with the mysterious fate of a sultry blues singer (Anika Noni Rose) from the '30s, because why else would our hero keep finding himself transported to the past? The answers aren't terribly surprising, nor is the pat resolution. This Bag is sadly empty of surprises...
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