The Institute, an adaptation of Stephen King’s 2019 novel of the same name, kicked off its first two episodes this week on the MGM+ streaming network (available through Prime Video). I’ve read the novel, and I would consider it one of the author’s lesser works. It’s not bad, but it’s decidedly mediocre.
But mediocrity has never stopped anyone from adapting source material from the Maine author. See also HBO Max’s adaptation of The Outsider. In fact, The Institute and The Outsider share something in common with a lot of Stephen King’s novels: they have compelling setups, but King fails to stick the landing. (At least The Outsider pulled Holly Gibney from the Bill Hodges trilogy and set the character up in her own series of novels, of varying quality.)
The Institute is about a group of kids with special powers — either telekinetic or telepathic — who are abducted from their parents and placed in an institute, where they are studied and tortured for nefarious reasons. The various kids attempt to figure out why and by whom, while also trying to escape. It’s a fairly grounded novel —until it isn’t.
The first two episodes of the series are largely faithful to the novel, except for one geographic quirk that drove me absolutely insane in the book. Granted, that quirk also generated much of the novel’s suspense, but ultimately for pointless reasons.
In both the novel and the series, the Institute is set in Maine, obviously a popular setting for the author, who hails from the state. However, there’s a parallel storyline concerning a night knocker — basically a cop who works the overnight shift. Ben Barnes plays him in the MGM+ series, and the character is the best part of both the novel and the show. He’s a former decorated cop slumming it in a small-town job because he’s still traumatized by the off-duty shooting of a 16-year-old kid who was carrying a weapon.
He’s great, but in the novel, he works out of a police station in a small town in North Carolina, which proved maddening. As a reader, all you could think was, “How is this storyline in North Carolina going to intersect with the Institute in Maine?” It really is annoying, and while I won’t spoil it, the geographic distance ultimately proves completely unnecessary.
Which is why it’s such a relief that in the MGM+ series, the Ben Barnes character, Tim Jamieson, works out of a small town in Maine. The mysteries of that small town are easier to associate with the Institute than with something 900 miles away. It’s been geographically streamlined, perhaps for budgetary reasons, but also to keep the viewer from obsessing over the distance between the two storylines.
It’s quite the relief. I doubt it will ultimately change the narrative or prevent the story from spinning out into messy chaos, but it’s at least one less rankling thing to preoccupy the mind.
