The Institute, Season One (2025)
I enjoyed Stephen King’s The Institute when I read it circa 2019. So naturally, I was intrigued when its story of psychic children kidnapped by a shadowy organization and forced to undergo bizarre experiments was adapted for TV. And for what it is, The Institute is enjoyable enough. However, it falls into the same trap as other King adaptations, i.e., it fails to really capture the depth of both the novel’s characters and its world. The actors involved, especially Ben Barnes and Joe Freeman, are clearly giving it their all, and their earnest performances are hard to dislike. Even so, the weak script doesn’t give them much to do. It also doesn’t help that The Institute occasionally feels like a mashup of Stranger Things (psychic kids, bizarre experiments) and Severance (the titular building’s liminal spaces and corporate weirdness, Mary-Louise Parker’s scene-chewing). A second season has already been green-lit, and I expect I’ll check it out, if only to see whether or not the series expands beyond the novel’s original storyline to hopefully develop more of its own identity.
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