I just watched the 1990 It miniseries and...

The It miniseries (1990) adapted Stephen King's novel in two parts with Tim Curry as Pennywise. It works as a product of its era, but its cast of stereotypes and its drift into adult melodrama leave it stuck in the middle.

Some adaptations are remembered for one single thing. In the case of It, the miniseries aired in **1990**, that thing has a clown's face and the voice of **Tim Curry**, who died in 2024. The production arrived two years after **Stephen King** published the novel, in **1986**, and it did so in television format, in two parts, at a time when the genre was coming off a decade of profitable slashers and the wake of **The Shining** (1980), **Stanley Kubrick**'s adaptation starring **Jack Nicholson**.

## A kids' club with catalog labels

The main group is a textbook losers' club. An overweight kid with family problems, a Jewish kid, a skinny kid, a kid of Italian descent, and a girl. Each one carries their label and their narrative function, with barely any room to break the mold. The addition of a Black kid in the final stretch, presented as the smart one, comes so late and so forced that you can see the calculation behind it.

That lineup of archetypes was common currency in youth fiction of the era. The difference is that here there is no time for the characters to breathe: the miniseries has to introduce them, pit them against the clown, and return them to adulthood within a few hours of runtime.

## Pennywise, a villain with debts

The clown stalking the kids does not come out of nowhere. Like **Freddy Krueger** in **A Nightmare on Elm Street** (**1984**), he is a being tied to a specific group, who appears only to certain people and acts out of revenge. The connection to the **bunny man** urban legends and the imagery of the sinister clown was already in the air when the miniseries was filmed.

Curry builds a character who is remembered more for his gestures and voice than for the script. He is the great asset of a production that, otherwise, relies on the television resources of the era: functional shots, measured scares, and a pacing designed around commercial breaks.

## The second part turns into a soap opera

The problem comes when the kids grow up. The adult plot gets tangled in love triangles: **Emily Perkins** first sets her sights on the overweight kid, then on the one who rides a bike, and ends up involved with the first one. Pavor gives way to melodrama, and the dialogues drag on without adding any tension.

Anyone coming looking for scares will find collective paranoia and little else. Anyone coming looking for the novel will find a disorganized summary. The miniseries is neither good nor bad: it is both at once, and that condemns it to an uncomfortable place in the memory of King adaptations.