If you didn’t see the first season of “Castle Rock”, the anthology series on Hulu set in the Stephen King universe (AKA the "Kingematic Universe"), then you are seriously missing out! But lucky for you, you don’t have to watch the 1st season before jumping right into the 2nd, coming out next month. Right in time for Halloween!
Season 1 tells the story of Henry Deaver (André Holland), a death row lawyer who is called back to his hometown of Castle Rock, Maine, to care for his ailing mother (Sissy Spacek) and take on a strange case about a man (Bill Skarsgard from It) hidden for years at Shawshank Prison. A slow, tense mystery unfolds, with many tie-ins to Stephen King’s existing works, and at the end of the season, you’ll be questioning what you believe to be real.
Season 2 tackles a completely different part of King’s mythology, but the setting of the town of Castle Rock, the connecting factor in the series, remains the same. And the focus this time around is on one of King's most iconic characters.
Here’s Hulu’s logline for the season: “A feud between warring clans comes to a boil when budding psychopath Annie Wilkes (Lizzy Caplan), Stephen King's nurse from hell, gets waylaid in Castle Rock.”
Lizzy Caplan (“Masters of Sex”, Mean Girls) plays a young Annie Wilkes, a character known for her murderous obsession in King’s Misery. The 1990 film adaptation stars Kathy Bates in the role, and she won the Academy Award for Best Actress for her performance.
It seems that Wilkes’s murderous history goes back farther than we thought, and adds some new elements previously unknown in King's novel. Season 2 of “Castle Rock” follows her on the run from the FBI with her daughter (Elsie Fisher from Eighth Grade), after committing a gruesome crime. The season also stars Tim Robbins (The Shawshank Redemption), Barkhad Abdi (Captain Phillips), Yusra Warsama (The Last Days On Mars), and Matthew Alan (“13 Reasons Why”).
Along with It: Chapter Two, Doctor Sleep, and In The Tall Grass, there are certainly a lot of upcoming Stephen King adaptations to look forward to! We can’t wait to see what the Hulu series has in store for the new season, so get ready to binge “Castle Rock” Season 2 on October 23 when it premieres on the streamer!