As you can imagine, Stephen King is under no obligation to enjoy every single adaptation of his work, which is fair enough when there’s been so many of a wildly varying quality. After all, his favorite live-action take on his work is one that he wrote himself exclusively for TV, and he also prefers The Shining miniseries to the Stanley Kubrick classic, but apparently he won’t even talk about Under the Dome.
The first season debuted to strong ratings and stellar reviews, but the subsequent two runs didn’t fair anywhere near as well on either front, and King’s sentiment that deviations from the source material may have been responsible aren’t too far off the mark, with the author musing that “it went off the rails and descended into complete mediocrity… It was a sad thing, but it didn’t bother me. I stopped watching after a while because I just didn’t give a f*ck.”
That’s fair enough, so you can understand why the latest episode of a King-centric podcast ended with the legendary author making it clear in no uncertain terms that it’s got nothing to do with the series of the same name that bastardized his work so badly.
As a general rule of thumb, King doesn’t tend to care for movies or TV show that take wild swings or make huge deviations from what was put on the page. That issue was exacerbated tenfold by the second and third seasons of Under the Dome, so it’s exceedingly easy to understand why the titan of terror was left so pissed off about it.