Streamin’ King: ‘The Institute’ Is A Little Bit ‘Firestarter,’ A Little Bit ‘IT’

Streamin’ King is grave-digging through the myriad Stephen King adaptations available on streaming. This time we’re watching The Institute, the 2025 MGM+ series based on the 2019 novel. 

THE GIST: Children with telepathy and telekinesis are kidnapped and brought to a remote Maine facility where their powers are harvested to repeatedly save the world—allegedly. Meanwhile, an ex-cop tries to get to the bottom of things and finds the relentless Institute has plenty of locals secretly on its payroll. The show got renewed for a second season just before its finale aired.

PEDIGREE: Created by Emmy-nominee Benjamin Cavell, who wrote and produced on Justified and co-created the 2020-21 The Stand limited series with Josh Boone. Executive producers include Stephen King and Jack Bender (Lost, Mr. Mercedes). Stars newcomer Joe Freeman, Emmy/Golden Globe-winner Mary-Louise Parker (Weeds), Ben Barnes (Westworld, The Punisher), Julian Richings (The Umbrella Academy), and Robert Joy (CSI: NY), with support from Jeff Fahey (Lost), Mary Walsh (This Hour Has 22 Minutes), Dan Beirne (Fargo season 2), Martin Roach (See), Hannah Galway (Sex/Life), and Jason Diaz (The 1oo). Besides Freeman, the main kids are played by Simone Miller (Detention Adventure), Fionn Laird, Arlen So, Viggo Hanvelt, and Birva Pandya. Score by Mark Korven, who did Robert Eggers’ The Witch and The Lighthouse.

WORTH WATCHING FOR CONSTANT READERS? Unless you were specifically allergic to the novel, you’ve got a mostly solid little show to check out here. It’s got its built-in challenges—network TV-ishness, visualizing psychic powers and communication, new actors—but none of them overpower King’s story and characters. The Institute might have looked superior and had more star power as a film, but unfurling over eight episodes serves it better. It’s not afraid to make adaptive changes, like putting Tim Jamieson in rural Maine, near the action, rather than halfway down the Eastern seaboard in South Carolina. By the third episode, they’re suddenly killing people who live through the book and bumping important kids to Back Half. The employees of the Institute are some of King’s most despicable villains, and that’s fully on display here.

WORTH WATCHING FOR KING NEWBIES/AGNOSTICS? It really comes down to whether you subscribe to MGM+ or are curious enough about The Institute to do a free trial. It’s surely one of their sharper offerings, but still, it is another streaming service. (The Harold Perrineau-starring series From is supposed to be excellent, though.) Some of the kids give strong performances from the jump; all of them get better and better as you go. And they’re always fucking cussing!

Our biggest star, Mary-Louise Parker, is being asked to do a lot of looking-at-computer acting but gets to shine early and at the end. Speaking of performance modes, young Joe Freeman does a lot of great cut-acting, i.e. performing while covered in nicks and scrapes and slashes and shit. The pacing can get a bit weird, but it works well as a fast binge and nicely avoids Stranger Things-iness. (And even if it steered straight into it, well…that’s what Stranger Things already did with King’s earlier work. Interesting feedback loop.) Folks who locked in on the TV adaptation of Marvel’s Runaways might find similar vibes here. It’s a moderately strong entry into the canon of evil institutions being poorly run and understaffed, like Severance and Annihilation/Jeff VanderMeer’s Area X series. 

9 STEPHEN KING TIES, REFERENCES, AND MISCELLANY:

1. One of our characters makes a daring escape, and the Shawshank Redemption line about how Andy Dufresne “crawled through a river of shit” comes to mind. This is mirrored on the page in The Institute, too, where you can’t help but think of one of the film’s most famous images—Tim Robbins raising his hands to the sky in the rain.

2. Actors who have made other visits to the Stephen King Cinematic & Televisual Universe: Mary-Louise Parker (Mr. Mercedes), Jeff Fahey (The Lawnmower Man, Under the Dome), Julian Richings (Chapelwaite, Kingdom Hospital), Robert Joy (The Dark Half), and Brendan Beiser (one ep of the Dead Zone TV show). Behind the camera, cinematographer Christopher Ball and director Jeff Renfroe both worked on Haven and Chapelwaite, while composer Mark Korven did In the Tall Grass and Chapelwaite (as well as Joe Hill’s The Black Phone).

3. I’ve made much about Mike Flanagan being the torchbearer for modern King movies, following in the steps of Rob Reiner and Frank Darabont. But Jack Bender—who’s also directed and produced on shows like From and Game of Thrones—is no slouch when it comes to getting SK’s books on TV. Bender’s first, Under the Dome (2013-15), started out okay but quickly plummeted in quality and limped to a season 3 finish line. Mr. Mercedes (2017-19) also ran three seasons and is supposed to be better, though I can’t yet confirm. Bender also executive produced HBO’s The Outsider in 2020.

4. The bond of It’s Losers’ Club was invoked in conversation before and after The Institute’s publication, and one kid in the book outright says, “I think we’re all losers.” In the show’s fifth episode, little Avery says, “We all go up the chimney here.” Extremely “Georgie saying ‘we all float down here’”–coded.

5. King has occasionally used afterwords to talk about real-life stories (often tragedies and injustices) that inspired the preceding work. The Institute is the very rare time he opens with a real-life statistic, like so:

6. “Orphan” Annie Ledoux’s role is sadly (yet purposefully) minimized here, but she does get to extoll the secret virtues of late night talk radio to Tim. In the book, it’s noted that “her conversation sometimes wandered off into strange byroads that had to do with flying saucers, walk-ins, and demonic possession.” Those concepts anchor, respectively, The Tommyknockers, later Dark Tower books, and Desperation, among many more.

7. Very light Dark Tower spoilers: later in the books, it’s revealed that psychically gifted children—the ones who shine—are routinely rounded up and brought to a compound (Blue Heaven/Algul Siento/the Devar-Toi) where their talents are channeled into performing powerful tasks with faraway results. “Prepped for use as psychic drones” is how it’s put in The Institute, which features chirpy signs like “Just another day in paradise,” which are very in line with the sunny environment Blue Heaven tries to cultivate.

8. This is as random as they come and forgive the pedantry if you already know, but: “TK” is used in journalism as a placeholder when drafting, meaning “to come.” One reason it’s TK and not TC is that those two letters very rarely appear together in that order in the English language. The Institute, which frequently calls telekinesis “TK,” had to be an absolute nightmare for editors.

9. Last but not least, the reaction GIF this show deserves to be famous for:

CRITICAL CONSENSUS: TV reviews that get harvested by Rotten Tomatoes and its ilk are typically based on the first few episodes of a show, so these numbers aren’t the most valuable, but: 64 percent on Rotten Tomatoes with a 71 audience score, 52/100 on Metacritic with a 6.3 out of 10 from users, and a 6.7/10 on IMDb.

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL CONTEXT FOR THE INSTITUTE (2019): The 561-pager came right in the middle of a particularly strong 2017-2021 run that began once the Bill Hodges/Mr. Mercedes trilogy had petered out. Chronologically, this streak went: Gwendy’s Button Box, Sleeping Beauties, The Outsider, Elevation, The Institute, If It Bleeds, Later, Billy Summers, the entire Lisey’s Story miniseries, and The Stand’s finale/epilogue “The Circle Closes.”

COMIN’ SOON ON STREAMIN’ KING: 2020’s The Outsider and 2017’s The Dark Tower. And keep an eye out for a slew of It: Welcome to Derry recaps by yours truly.

Zach Dionne is a Mainer writing in Tennessee; he makes Stephen King things on Patreon.