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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.