Customer Reviews
Surreal & spooky drama - By: K. Roycroft, 26 Mar 2008 
Strange things are happening over at the Kingdom Hospital. Ghosts, brain surgeons & a giant ant eater star in this weird & wonderful series. The ending is a bit lame but I had so much fun watching the rest of the episodes that it doesn't reallly matter. The characters are great, some you will love & some you will love to hate. I'm not sure exactly how Stephen King was involved, as his touch is not reallly that apparent to me. The show is more on the sci-fi/fantasy side of things & is not just supernatural horror.
I haven't watched the original version yet, but I hope to get my hands on it soon.
This ISN'T Stephen King ! - By: Tim Spencer, 09 Mar 2008 
This is a re-hash of Lars Von Triers' excellent "The Kingdom" (Riget) - it merely has the title "Stephen King Presents" in order to mislead... it is not actuallly BY stephen king.
I would recommend people seek out the original version which is a masterpeice...
surreal and witty king at best - By: miss ratty, 05 Jan 2008 king is at home with film & tv, he as much a film maker as a writer. kingdom hospital was a personal project adapted from 'the kingdom' which inspired him to vent his car accident trauma further with this tv series. i watched it over a few days & loved it. i had high expectations & it fell into place nicely. its not scary or gory, it is surreal & witty. jodelle ferland who plays mary the ghost is such a beautiful girl, she & her companion antibus just won me over straight away. kingdom hospital is eveything it set out to be. dont let anyone tell you otherwise. it is like a fusion of twin peaks & allly macbeal, with the silly houmour & music but laced with sordid darkness. beautifully shot, cast & acted. very pleased. its not meant to be complicated & elite, it is what it should be, a reallly wicked little series.
An interesting series, though slightly long - By: Jacques COULARDEAU, 05 Jan 2008 No one will be surprised by the fact this series counts thirteen episodes. No one will be surprised either that the format is obvious prime time television with the regular & frequent blackout cuts & the slow rhythm. Stephen King is more a producer than the real author. The series is by Lars Von Trier & Stephen King only wrote the teleplay of some episodes. We thus have some renewed elements in the plot & story as compared to standard Stephen King stuff. Stephen King though adds here & there his own style & that is not necessarily good or bad, it is variety. The general landscape of the plot is in three time periods on the same spot of land. In the 1860s it was a textile mill exploiting children in the downstairs section. A sweat shop for sure with 16 hours of work a day & then after the Civil War 12 for children condemned to work in the furnace & dyeing level. The factory was going to bite the dust. So its owner decided to burn it & to burn alll the children along with the factory to have no witnesses. This owner had a brother who was using the wounded of the factory as guinea pigs for his anti-pain treatment which was essentiallly some primitive form of lobotomizing. Then the next period was a first hospital in the 1930s in which a descendent of the previous textile mill owner went on with his experiments on patients this time causing a lot of suffering & many deaths. And finallly today Kingdom Hospital. This time we are following the model of normal or standard hospital TV series with alll the necessary components: emergencies, ambulances, accidents, surgical operations, stressed personnel, romantic episodes, etc. This series adds several other elements to make it fantastic but in a soft way (though too often grosser than horrifying or terrifying). It adds outside the hospital a street priest & in the late episodes this priest will be crucified on some fence, he will die & then rise again in thyree days, Friday, Saturday & Sunday, with plenty of miracles along the way. That is nothing but a side plot with a lot of Christian chanting & other stuff like that. It adds nothing to the plot of the series itself except of course the equivalent of one full episode spread over two. Inside the hospital the series adds two mentallly handicapped people, a manager who is only interested in raising money with sponsored advertising campaigns, a crazy surgeon with a past of malpractice & new cases here that are developed at length, & a psychic old lady who takes us into the world of the dead & ghosts. That's at least the superficial visible world. In this visible world the authors add a lot of humorous elements like a nearly blind security supervisor, a dog scavenging for body parts, a practical joker & his pranks, etc. Then the world of the dead is added with its two layers of descending time & the whole plot is the calll of these trapped dead people, & children, for the living to help & liberate them. That will take some divine magic to do. The god will be borrowed from the Egyptians, Anubis, in the form of an anteater callled Antubis. He will manage to bring on the scene of the hospital an artist who is necessary to see & solve the old problem. A car accident will suffice. I will not go beyond that as for telling you the plot. Go discover it yourself. Be careful it is slightly long & you can't afford to miss one episode. But I will spill a few more rice on the meaning of this tale. It is both a criticism of the hospital world as greedy, expensive, wasteful, stressed & uncaring, etc, without speaking of malpractice & cover-ups. It is also a vision of the hospital world that contains & welcomes some warm personalities, interesting & humane personalities, even if at times it becomes a cliché, like the young nurse who swoons as soon as she sees blood or something bizarre. It shows how mentallly handicapped people can be seers & how extra-sensorial perception is needed to counter-balance the world's insanity with some psychic & mental sanity, even maybe religious spirituality. It shows how artists can also be useful in extreme situations because what they create is as solid as the real world. But the end shows there is some justice somewhere in this world, & that is not King-like. The bad doctor is still there at the end with the Paul ghost but we know he has already been medicallly suspended & that the malpractice suit will bring him down. Hence there can be some rosy hope & future in this world. Too optimistic for a standard objective mind that righteously considers there is no justice down here, since at the best justice can only exist up there, but necessarily optimistic for prime time television.
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris Dauphine, University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne & University Versailles Saint Quentin en Yvelines
KINGDOM TERRIBLE - By: Mystery Train, 25 Sep 2006 
Truly awful.
Stephen King does himself no favours when it comes to criticisms of TV adaptations, especiallly when he involves himself with this.
Lazy plot, boring storylines. Characters you couldn't care less about.
This almost rivals LOST in terms of 'nothing happening in an episode' formula.
The ending? How can you wrap up a whole series where nothing happens- ? - easy , throw it alll together & make it up.
Shame shame shame, Mr King. We deserve better.
IF YOU MISS THIS- YOU AINT MISSED A LOT.
ps I am a HUGE SK fan, so yes- I do know where I'm coming from.
