I Watched All Four Hours of ABC's The Langoliers (1995)

In 1995 the network TV mini-series had already eclipsed its zenith. Six years earlier, CBS aired the 8 hour Lonesome Dove series starring Tommy Lee Jones and Robert Duvall (in perhaps his single greatest performance). Because in the 90s, and, honestly, even in the best of times, ABC has never been the most innovative broadcast network, they were desperate to try to catch lightning in a bottle with a mini-series of their own based on a story by America's most popular writer, Stephen King. The problem with a series like Lonesome Dove, and what ultimately resulted in the production of The Langoliers, is that you need to own the option on the source material, and the production rights to all of King's major works were already owned by film studios. That meant that if you wanted to make a mini-series based on King's work, you would need something...less well known. What ABC ultimately settled on "The Langoliers" a novella from King's abysmal collection Four Past Midnight.

Four Past Midnight is, overall, pretty awful. It contains four tales, of which "The Langoliers" is the best. "The Library Policeman" is a gross, vulgar story with very little by way of redeeming value, "Secret Window, Secret Garden" is alright, but turns into a psychological realm where King is not at his strongest, and "The Sun Dog" is like an episode of the Twilight Zone. What separates "The Langoliers" from the pack is not some intense virtue of its own, but the fact that it has a novel conceit and runs against a weak pack. That was good enough for ABC and the project went into production.

The story is fairly simple. A red-eye flight full of people passes through an aurora over the desert and is transported into the past. Anyone awake at the time of the time jump disappears in the grand tradition of the Rapture, leaving behind surgical pins, pacemakers, hairpieces, and watches. Those who were asleep, 10 people in total, awaken to discover that they are totally alone, in an abandoned world, forced to figure out what had happened to them and why.

By 1995 the idea of computer generated special effects had come a long way. Spielberg's dinosaurs had shifted our understanding of what it was possible to produce with a computer, but the costs were still prohibitive for a television studio (even a broadcast network) in an age when first view advertisement constituted the vast majority of revenue for anything that aired and there was little to no value in owning a catalog of content, or, for those who don't pay much attention to television economics, the precise opposite situation we have today where even prestige networks compete with each other in the race to get "over the top." The Langoliers attempted to split the difference, and in doing so sealed its own fate. Roundly mocked upon release for the impossible cheesiness of the visual effects.

The cast, with the exceptions of David Morse, Dean Stockwell, and Bronson Pinochet (who TV Guides' review said was "like an alien thespian from Planet Ham), are better suited to these early scenes because the situation is overwhelming, and the only impression any of the other actors give off is one of being totally disjointed and uncomfortable. Watching them one gets the impression that the most pronounced physical consequence of time travel is constipation. Though perhaps one should not be so hard on them, the dialogue they are given is not of the freshest quality. At one point poor Patricia Wettig actually has to say out loud, to other human beings, "to England for me, there's an old man there that people still call 'the gaffer.'" Outside of the Shire, I'm not sure what a compelling reading of that line would even look like.

The score is portentous and sounds as if it were all being played on an old style Casio Pt-1 electric synthesizer, the kind that you had to plug floppy disks into to make it run--as if they hauled poor Vladimir Horunzhy off of the lot, and plunked him down in an old prop room and told him to make it happen.

By now you are probably asking yourself "did Dave watch four hours of nonsense just to make fun of it on his blog?" That's a fair question, and ultimately I will say no, I did not do that. I remember watching The Langoliers when it first came out in 1995, while on a family vacation, and I remember that it scared the hell out of me. I was nine years old at the time, and found frightening the vast empty spaces that should be populated but were not. This is, for whatever it is worth, something that has stuck with me all my life. There is very little I enjoy more than the sublime fear of walking through empty streets at night, in the dark, and feeling the emptiness of places where I am accustomed to the presence of people. It is delirious and creepy, and it makes me understand how monsters were invented in folk cultures all around the world to explain the strange loneliness of the night. Those parts of The Langoliers: the silence that does not echo, the air that has no smell, the alienating strangeness of the obdurate past, still work.

The ultimate appearance of the Langoliers themselves (the term does not refer to the time travelers, but to the gremlins composed of nothing but fur and teeth that devour the past "when today has become yesterday") is stupid, but the build up to their appearance has an appeal to it, and King's representation of the past (as brought to the screen by adapter and director Tom Holland) as a world devoid of meaning, waiting only to be consumed into abject nothingness, is interesting and adds another note to the dialogue of time travel philosophy. For that reason alone, it is worth watching if you get a chance. There are worse ways to pass a couple of hours.