page_title: It (miniseries)
section_title: Context
hierarchical_section_title: It (miniseries) / Context
caption_attribution_description: English: Stephen King, American author best known for his enormously popular horror novels. King was the 2003 recipient of The National Book Foundation's Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. Taken at the 2007 New York Comicon.
context_page_description: It is a 1990 American ABC two-part psychological horror drama miniseries directed by Tommy Lee Wallace and adapted by Lawrence D. Cohen from Stephen King's 1986 novel of the same name. The story revolves around a predatory monster which has the ability to transform itself into its prey's worst fears, allowing it to exploit the phobias of its victims. It mostly takes the humanoid form of a darkly comedic clown called Pennywise. The protagonists are The Lucky Seven, or The Losers Club, a group of outcast kids who discover Pennywise and vow to kill him by any means necessary. The series takes place over two different time periods, the first when the Losers first confront Pennywise as children in 1960, and the second when they return as adults in 1990 to defeat him a second time after he resurfaces.
  A special of the November sweeps month of 1990, It was still a big risk for ABC due to horror's lack of popularity in television, declining network viewership decreasing the impact of big events like miniseries, while theatrical versions of King's work being box office bombs.
context_section_description: A horror sci-fi miniseries these days is as rare as moon rocks, as few and far between as known inhabited planets.
  — A 1990 review of It from The Hollywood Reporter.
  TV's inherent timidity its fear of going too far and driving away viewers is in direct contrast to the purpose of horror, which is to go so far that it scares the people who watch it.
  — A contemporaneous It review explaining horror's difficulty in television.
  There was only one television version of a Stephen King story before It, that being the 1979 adaptation of 'Salem's Lot (1975), directed by Tobe Hooper. Although critically acclaimed, it didn't change King's negative view on horror television as he still believed that the format was "too institutionally fainthearted and unimaginative to handle real horror" in 1983. This skepticism continued in the mid-1980s when he wrote and published It (1986), and he never thought a television version of the book would happen despite its success. His reason was that it was a censorship rule not to show children in jeopardy, a major theme in It.
  It was written over four years by King with inspirations from the story "Three Billy Goats Gruff" and legends about Bangor, Maine's sewer system. Despite garnering a polarized critical response for its huge amount of pages and bizarre sexual sequences, It was the best-selling hardcover fiction book in the United States in 1986, according to Publishers Weekly; and a British Fantasy Award winner.
  King's predictions about a TV version of the book not happening, while false, were also justified according to newspaper critic Matt Roush. At the end of the 1980s, a horror product of any kind was an unlikely gamble for a network. The television market was dominated by sitcoms, soap operas, and fictional presentations of real life events; there were series like Freddy's Nightmares (1988–90) and Friday the 13th: The Series (1987–90), but they were often hampered by network censorship, commercial breaks, low budgets, and "cheesy execution." Other factors increased the risk of a network doing a film or miniseries version of a King story in the late 1980s to 1990; theatrical King screen transfers were performing poorly at the box office, and big TV events like miniseries or films were becoming far less important to viewers due to a rise in VCR ownership by 20 percent from 1985 to 1990. This resulted in channels like ABC taking several cost-cutting measures, such as adding more regular series to its lineup.
  Some critics also questioned the airing of a horror film like It on television, a format much easier for children to access than theaters due to less parental and government restrictions.
  King described his expectations of the miniseries being "in the basement. Here was a book that sprawled over 1,000 pages, and they were going to cram it into four hours, with commercials."
caption: King held strong dismay for television's limiting market of horror, and had low expectations once the miniseries was greenlit.
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