Originally airing on the now-defunct Audience Network, Mr. Mercedes was an awesome series that for a long time wasn't terrifically easy for Stephen King fans to watch. It only ever aired on the exclusively AT&T/DirecTV-based channel, and while seasons could be purchased digitally or on DVD (months after their debuts), there was initially no streaming deal in place. That dark period fortunately came to an end in the second half of last year, as Peacock struck a deal that made two-thirds of the show available – and now the Master of Horror is celebrating because we are only one month away from seeing it stream in its entirety.
Peacock, the service owned by NBCUniversal, will be making Mr. Mercedes Season 3 available starting on March 4, and Stephen King took to Twitter today to both announce the news to his fans and also heap praise upon the work. He wrote:
As noted by the author, Mr. Mercedes is an adaptation of the book trilogy that launched in 2014 with the novel of the same name and was followed by Finders Keepers in 2015 and End of Watch in 2016. At the center of all three is Bill Hodges, who we meet in the first story as a recently-retired police detective haunted by a case he could never solve involving a psychopath who drove a Mercedes Benz through a crowd of people lining up for a job fair. He doesn't know it, but the man he is searching for is a mild-mannered monster named Brady Hartsfield, who taunts Hodges in an attempt to try and get him to kill himself, but instead makes the former cop more passionate than ever about finding him.
In the adaptation, which was created by TV veteran David E. Kelley, Bill Hodges is played by the always-spectacular Brendan Gleeson, and putting on a sick and devilish performance as Brady Hartsfield is Picard's Harry Treadaway. There are some significant changes made from the source material for Mr. Mercedes, but a lot of them turn out to be incredibly beneficial to the story (especially in the first run of episodes). That being said, one of the stranger things is that while Season 1 is naturally based on the first book in the trilogy, Season 2 is based on the third, and Season 3 is based on the second.
Though Stephen King obviously has a long history of seeing his books/short stories adapted for television, Mr. Mercedes is sincerely one of the best that we've seen, and hopefully it will start to get more of the attention that it deserves while living on Peacock (though I'm not exactly going to hold out hope that we will someday see a wholly-original Season 4 get made). Not only is the cat-and-mouse game played by Brendan Gleeson and Harry Treadaway dynamite, but the show also features Justine Lupe as Holly Gibney (the young woman who eventually becomes Bill Hodges' business partner) and it's impossible not to love her interpretation of the character – which is wholly different than Cynthia Erivo's version featured in HBO's The Outsider (which is based on Stephen King's spin-off novel from the Mr. Mercedes trilogy).
While we count down the days until Mr. Mercedes Season 3 is made available on Peacock, I'd highly recommend filling the time by checking out the show. Season 1 is accessible to anybody who has a free account on the streaming service, and Season 2 is available to Premium and Premium Plus subscribers.
