This unctuous explanation is classic King: low-key, easygoing malice. “You’re stepping out, and I’m stepping in.” “Think of your life as a pair of shoes,” Landry (Mr. Horror ensues when Landry succeeds in giving life to the detective Clyde Umney - some of the resonant names here are taken from the work of Raymond Chandler - and torturing him with words. The spin here is that Landry believes that if he invents some fearless, womanizing type, he might swap lives with him and thus acquire some of that genre’s sangfroid. The writer, Sam Landry, has lost his young son in an inexplicable swimming-pool accident like Jack Torrance in “The Shining,” he spends his days trying to write his way into and out of his sorrows. Macy as both a hard-boiled 1930’s detective and the modern-day writer who invents him. A gonzo noir special with some postmodern curlicues, the movie introduces Mr. Macy’s episode, “Umney’s Last Case,” will appear next Wednesday. When trigger-happy toy soldiers come seeking revenge on him, his wordless indoor showdown with the intrepid inch-tall infantry - a reworking of Gulliver and the Lilliputians - is a minor masterpiece. Hurt seems to have taken some cues from James Gandolfini in playing the brutal, immortal lunkhead. (Is it any wonder that there’s something Oedipal to this kind of writing?)
The teleplay was written by Richard Christian Matheson, the great pulp-horror writer and son of the great pulp-horror writer Richard Matheson.
Hurt’s episode, “Battleground,” appears tonight, and it’s ingenious: an almost entirely silent film that uses latter-day devices - e-mail, a P.D.A., the closed-captioning on the television set in a bar - to tell the story of a hit man who murders a toy company executive. Macy and William Hurt, are proof that TNT, having had success with “Salem’s Lot” in 2004, is really getting into the moviemaking game, and setting out to lure serious actors. These elaborate, showoff productions, which star people like William H. King’s short stories, and five in this series come from his book “Nightmares and Dreamscapes.” Apparently nothing Mr. King’s visions so fascinating is not their uniqueness or their artistry, but exactly how much they’re like ordinary nightmares. Tonight TNT begins its eight-part, four-week King series, with two movies to appear each Wednesday: “Nightmares and Dreamscapes: From the Stories of Stephen King.” The series is an excellent reminder that what makes Mr. King’s don’t cohere they’re desultory and plotless, characters come and go, and dialogue that sounds pithy is also meaningless. What’s so great about that? Like all of our boring dreams, Mr. Stephen King has no end of bankable nightmares: the surreal, farrago kind, in which the cursor turns into your father, who is also Jack Kennedy, and he keeps slipping into the pool.
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