CASTLE ROCK: Sam Shaw and Dustin Thomason on the Draw of Small Town Stories, Stephen King’s Blessing

Long before writers Sam Shaw and Dustin Thomason co-created Hulu’s new drama CASTLE ROCK, they fell in love with Stephen King-like stories. (Their new series is set in the King multiverse, as they revisit what is going on now in the fictional town of Castle Rock.)

“I’ve always loved—I think we both have—stories of strange happenings in small towns,” Shaw shared with reporters in the video below. (Shaw is also a huge TWIN PEAKS fan who went viral after he wore a one-of-a-kind jacket to that show’s revival premiere.) “And just stories about secrets that lurk behind picket fences. In this case, the picket fence has been gone for a long time in Castle Rock…to a certain extent, I think we’ve always been obsessed with stories about the dysfunction of small towns.”

“Part of what I think we always loved as readers of Stephen King was how specific his anthropology of New England and of Maine was,” he continued. “He really lovingly became an archivist of small town life there. It was exciting for us to check in on this town we had been reading about for a long time, and re-imagine it in 2018.”

Of course, King’s approval itself was important. At New York Comic Con in 2017, Shaw and Thomason revealed others had tried to tackle a show like this in the past, but they were the first to get King’s approval.

“When you’re trying to essentially tell a new Stephen King story—and you’re a fan, like we are, [who] grew up on Stephen King, and have revered the writer—it was really important to us, and we never would have done it without his blessing and without the feeling we were delivering something, creatively, that he was going to be happy with,” Thomason said. “I think that ultimately, every character choice, every setting of his that we wanted to use in this first season, we went to him and made sure he was okay with it.”

One of the big asks was the one (immediately apparent) tie to a King original character—former sheriff Alan Pangborn (played in CASTLE ROCK by Scott Glenn), who appeared/was mentioned in a number of Castle Rock-set stories. Added Thomason: “It was important for us to know that Steve was comfortable with us telling the Alan postscript.”

Check out the video for more from Shaw and Thomason…

CASTLE ROCK, Wednesday, Hulu

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• CASTLE ROCK: Bill Skarsgård on Diving Back into the Stephen King Universe
• CASTLE ROCK at Comic-Con: Live-Blog
• CASTLE ROCK Series Premiere: ‘Severance’ Photos
• CASTLE ROCK at ATX: Live-Blog

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