Why?

Why would you adapt Robert McCammon’s Stinger if you‘re going to strip away all the gore, the cinematic set-pieces, the incredibly vicious and horrific monster and, most importantly, the sense of fun? Why would you replace all the vibrant, sometimes stereotypical, but often textured and courageous characters with a bunch of dull, one-note clichés? Why would you sldeline the race and class issues at the heart of the novel—particularly between white and Latino communities—problems that have only grown more significant and knottier in the subsequent forty years and replace them with infidelity, possibly the most asinine of dramatic conflicts in modern media and literature?*

Any why—WHY!?—would you bother adapting Stinger when what you clearly wanted was to adapt “The Thing”, just with less splatter, tension or stakes?

If you have any love for the book, do not bother with Teacup. Watching all eight episodes hoping the show would click and that they would eventually do something interesting with the source material was a stupid mistake. This is a vapid, pedestrian show with a cast of terrific actors (you can look them up) hamstrung by stilted dialogue. Nothing good comes from watching this show.

If Teacup gets a second season and not KAOS, I may weep.** The only good thing about Teacup is that it got me to read Stinger. Read Stinger.

*No, no, no—you don’t get to point to the fact that it’s a white man cheating on his white wife with a Latino woman and say: see… we’re playing with the same fundamental concerns as the novel. 

**Yes, I know, different media conglomerates. But still.