Bag of Bones miniseries--fail

Ultimately--Bag of Bones

The largely unfortunate miniseries of the outstanding book by Stephen King left me with a taste of flat diet soda in my mouth. There were about three shocking, powerful scenes out of the whole four hours...and part of the problem, a LARGE part of the problem, was four hours. There simply was not time to develop the characters, let alone much of the storyline, in four hours. Bag of Bones is a long book. Stephen King writes long books. Sometimes they're unnecessarily long. In the case of Bag of Bones...perhaps the gravity of the story deserved the length. Even though I read the book multiple times and loved it, I felt zero connection to any of the characters in the miniseries except for Sara Tidwell. Jo Noonan, Mattie Devore, Max Devore, and Rogette Devore may as well have been cardboard cutouts. I had zero interest in any of them. Other than Max Devore, they had no backstory. Jo Noonan was a HUGE presence in the book, but all she did in the miniseries was ring bells, and Sara Tidwell's murdered child had almost no existence in the television version. There was not even an explanation of WHY the lake was called Dark Score Lake and the rest of Sara Tidwell's band and their particular place in history was completely ignored. This should have been a short series instead of a four hour confusing mishmash. There was one, literally one great and powerful scene. The rest of it was almost garbage.

I suppose my conclusion is that writers need to retain  as much creative control as possible over the film adaptions of their books, otherwise it's all going to go to utter tripe like Bag Of Bones and True Blood.