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Castle Rock: all the updates, trailers, and commentary for Hulu’s Stephen King-inspired show

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Hulu recently launched its Stephen King-inspired show, Castle Rock, and it’s going to be coming back for a second season sometime next year. While the show isn’t directly based on any specific work by King, it’s a sort of mixtape of the greatest elements from his stories.

The show is an anthology: this season follows the sudden appearance of an unnamed man (played by Bill Skarsgård), in Shawshank Prison, and the efforts of his lawyer (played by André Holland) who returns home to try and find out why the town of Castle Rock is affected by supernatural forces. When season 2 debuts next year, it’ll have a completely different cast and story.

Follow along for all of the updates, trailers, and commentary for the series.

  • Aug 15, 2018

    Andrew Liptak

    Hulu’s Castle Rock is getting a second season

    Image: Hulu

    Hulu has announced that its Stephen King anthology show Castle Rock will return for a second season. With its renewal, it will follow a brand-new storyline.

    According to The Hollywood Reporter, Hulu says that Castle Rock is the streaming service’s most “most successful first-season original launch.” When exactly the show will return is yet to be announced.

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  • Jul 27, 2018

    Noel Murray

    Castle Rock is the perfect excuse to start watching Haven on Netflix

    Photo courtesy of Syfy

    There are so many streaming options available these days, and so many conflicting recommendations, that it’s hard to see through all the crap you could be watching. Each Friday, The Verge’s Cut the Crap column simplifies the choice by sorting through the overwhelming multitude of movies and TV shows on subscription services, and recommending a single perfect thing to watch this weekend.

    “Sarah,” a third-season episode of the supernatural drama Haven. Based loosely on the Stephen King novel The Colorado Kid, the series stars Emily Rose as Audrey Parker, an outsider to the Maine island community of Haven, who has the ability to recognize the dangerous anomalies that the more acclimated locals no longer notice. In “Sarah,” Audrey spots subtle changes to her reality, which alerts her to a crisis back in 1955, where her policeman colleague Nathan Wuornos (Lucas Bryant) and her friend Duke Crocker (Eric Balfour) have just been mystically transported by an elderly Haven resident. The episode cuts back and forth between the past, where Nathan and Duke are trying to find this man’s younger self, and to fix what they’ve inadvertently broken, and the present, where Audrey races to ascertain the meaning of the altered timeline, and to bring the boys back home.

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  • Tasha Robinson

    Jul 26, 2018

    Tasha Robinson

    Castle Rock and Sharp Objects are the same show with different skins

    Photos courtesy of HBO / Hulu

    No matter how splintered the cinematic landscape gets, the “twin films” phenomenon keeps resurfacing. Whether it comes from studios trying to ride each other’s publicity coattails, or just parallel evolution as different producers chase the same ideas through the zeitgeist, it’s still fairly common to see, say, the dystopian evil-twin fantasies Double and The Enemy coming out in the same year, or White House Down and Olympus Has Fallen — both White House invasion action movies — fighting for supremacy at the box office.

    “Twin TV shows” don’t get nearly the same amount of cultural attention, though, maybe because so much of television operates around familiar, predictable trends — if one year sees four different procedural dramas about a troubled detective with a maybe-love-interest partner and a peculiarly quirky way of solving crimes, that just sounds like a slow year for detective procedurals.

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  • Lizzie Plaugic

    May 2, 2018

    Lizzie Plaugic

    Hulu’s Stephen King anthology series Castle Rock gets a new teaser

    Hulu just released a new teaser for its upcoming drama Castle Rock that hints at how the mysterious Maine town turned out the way it did. The series, created by J.J. Abrams’ Bad Robot Productions, is inspired by the interconnected Stephen King universe.

    In the teaser, Lost’s Terry O’Quinn’s gentle voiceover describes the “original sin” of Castle Rock, a fictional town in which a number of King’s novels are set, including The Dead Zone, Cujo, and The Dark Half. Castle Rock will feature themes and characters from across King’s work, as well as a few new characters created just for the TV series and several actors from previous iterations of King adaptations, like Sissy Spacek (Carrie) and Bill Skarsgård (2017’s It), playing new roles.

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  • Oct 9, 2017

    Andrew Liptak

    Hulu’s Castle Rock will be an anthology show that connects the worlds of Stephen King

    Warner Bros. unveiled a first look at its upcoming Stephen King-inspired show Castle Rock with a teaser trailer at New York Comic Con today, which included details about a new cast and story planned for season 2. 

    In February, J.J. Abrams announced a new show for Hulu that would be heavily inspired by King’s enormous, interconnected world, set in the familiar location of Castle Rock, but with few other details. The show is expected to begin streaming at some point in 2018. 

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  • Bryan Bishop

    Feb 18, 2017

    Bryan Bishop

    Stephen King and J.J. Abrams are going to show Stranger Things how it’s done

    Last year, Netflix scored an unexpected hit with Stranger Things, a show that combined the influence of Stephen King and Steven Spielberg into one glorious, retro-80s treat. Audiences apparently weren’t the only ones that noticed, because now King and Spielberg heir apparent J.J. Abrams have announced a Hulu project with its own Stranger Things-esque vibe called Castle Rock.

    The announcement came today via the Twitter account of Abrams’ Bad Robot Productions, with a mysterious, handwritten card from the filmmaker asking, “What is the hoax in the forest?” A link to the teaser trailer was also included, a short clip that rattles off many of King’s most famous novels and characters, before revealing the names of both the author and Abrams, stylized in a font that will look very familiar to fans of Stranger Things. (It should be noted that Things lifted its font from King’s own books, making this a bit of an influence merry-go-round.)

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