Lost 1990s ‘Tommyknockers’ Series Shows Off King’s Weirdest Era

In the middle of Stephen King’s TV takeover, one adaptation quietly slipped through the cracks. ABC’s 1993 miniseries of The Tommyknockers arrived between cultural touchstones like It and The Stand, then more or less vanished from the conversation. Now, as fans and critics revisit King’s strangest period, this bizarre slice of ’90s sci-fi horror is getting a second look.

A flawed King adaptation with surprising bite

Based on King’s 1987 novel The Tommyknockers, the ABC miniseries leans hard into small-town paranoia and clunky alien tech. King has long called the book itself a misfire, shaped by his own addiction, and has said there’s a tighter, better story buried inside its 700 pages. The TV version doesn’t fully find that hidden classic, but it comes closer than many remember.

The story follows blocked Western writer Bobbi (Marg Helgenberger) and her poet boyfriend Gard (Jimmy Smits) after they dig up something unearthly near the town of Haven, Maine. Soon the locals develop telepathy, manic inventiveness, and a growing obsession with a pulsing green glow. The miniseries plays this both straight and campy: killer soda machines, sentient dolls, and hospital rooms full of people whispering “Tommyknockers” turn the creeping corruption into a kind of daylight nightmare.

Smits keeps one foot on the ground as Gard, largely immune to the town’s transformation, while Helgenberger leans into Bobbi’s self-destruction as she embraces the alien influence. It’s not the most graceful adaptation of King’s addiction metaphor, but there’s a streak of real pathos under the rubbery effects and network-TV pacing. As Slashfilm’s new retrospective notes, if you accept the mystery at face value—families torn apart by something they can’t control—the emotional beats still land.

King’s TV boom and the adaptation that got left behind

The Tommyknockers hit television during King’s first major miniseries boom. ABC had already turned It into 1990 “event TV,” and The Stand followed in 1994, cementing King as a network-era ratings draw. Yet unlike those projects, which keep resurfacing on streaming and in pop culture, Tommyknockers became a kind of lost cousin—too weird, too uneven, and overshadowed by the megahits around it.

Modern viewers are coming back to this era thanks to rediscoveries like the 1994 Stand miniseries finding new life on Prime Video and the continuing appetite for deep-cut adaptations such as CBS’s underrated Under the Dome. In that context, ABC’s Tommyknockers plays less like a failure and more like a fascinating experiment from King’s transitional years.

Hollywood hasn’t given up on the material, either. Universal Pictures previously developed a feature film version, with Jeremy Slater signed on to write and James Wan attached to produce, hoping to finally unlock the sharper story King believes is buried in Haven’s soil. (The Wrap) That project has since stalled, but the renewed interest in the miniseries—and in King’s weirder, more sci-fi-leaning work—suggests we haven’t seen the last of the “becoming.”

For now, ABC’s The Tommyknockers stands as a time capsule of both King and television at a crossroads: part earnest cosmic horror, part goofy network spectacle, and unexpectedly resonant in an age of AI anxiety and technological overreach. It’s not his greatest adaptation, but if you’re curious about the odd corners of the King multiverse, this forgotten miniseries might finally deserve a spot on your watchlist.