Stephen King says he’s not involved in Castle Rock TV series. Sigh.

So we’ve known for a while that Hulu were making a TV series that aimed to tie together the works of Stephen King, but our hearts sank a little at the latest news…

Castle Rock, as King fans will know, is sort of the centre of the world when it comes to King stories (we know the Dark Tower is the cosmic centre) as they all either take place in or around the fictional New England Town or at the very least tie back to it with references or characters.

The first teaser for the series (here) teased connections to the King world in a major way including It and Misery.

So, while we were excited for the show, we sort of assumed King himself, as the creator if the universe, would be heavily involved in the show, however, it seems now.

In a recent interview, when the topic of the series came up, King’s response was rather disheartening: “I’m as much in the dark as anybody else. I don’t know anything about it so I just hope it turns out really well. It must be going okay. It’s typical J.J. There’s been nothing that I’ve seen in the press, or anything, about it.”

While this year was great for King fans with IT, Mr Mercedes and Gerald’s Game all achieving high regard among fans and critics and big and small screens, the disappointment of The Dark Tower still stings us.

Speaking of The Dark Tower, the writer is pretty careful about what he can say and why he feels it failed, however, he does have an idea of at least one thing that was definitely a major miscalculation – the age rating: “The real problem, as far as I’m concerned is, they went in to this movie, and I think this was a studio edict pretty much: this is going to be a PG-13 movie. It’s going to be a tentpole movie. We want to make sure that we get people in there from the ages of, let’s say, 12 right on up to whatever the target age is. Let’s say 12 to 35. That’s what we want. So it has to be PG-13, and when they did that I think that they lost a lot of the toughness of it and it became something where people went to it and said, Well yeah, but it’s really not anything that we haven’t seen before.”

Well, that’s certainly one of many issues that movie had. Anyway…

Let’s hope that JJ Abrams can deliver without the input of King because, honestly, a shared King universe TV series sounds like the best idea in the history of great ideas. Seriously.

A psychological-horror series set in the Stephen King multiverse, Castle Rock combines the mythological scale and intimate character storytelling of King’s best-loved works, weaving an epic saga of darkness and light, played out on a few square miles of Maine woodland. The series stars André Holland, Melanie Lynskey, Sissy Spacek, Billy Skarsgård, Jane Levy and Scott Glenn.

Sam Shaw & Dustin Thomason developed the project for television and serve as executive producers along with J.J. Abrams, Ben Stephenson and Liz Glotzer. Castle Rock is from Bad Robot Productions in association with Warner Bros. Television.

Castle Rock is coming to Hulu in 2018.