How I created 'Golden Years'...and spooked dozens of TV executives

The producer who rescued Golden Years was Richard Rubinstein (Creepshow). Richard read the Golden Years scripts in first draft and was the only production-side person who really liked them. But as an independent who was % just getting his feet wet in the syndie TV market at the time, he had very little clout. He asked me to keep him in mind, however, and it was pretty clear he was keeping the series in his mind. Whenever we met, he'd ask me what was cookin' with Golden Years and the people who populate that rather weird scientific facility in upstate New York.

Nothing much did cook for a time, and then the factors that finally resulted in production began to come together. The most important factor of all may have been the success last year of the ABC version of my novel It. That miniseries scored both in the Nielsens and with TV critics, who have, as a rule, almost no use for horror tales. The ironic side of this was that my name became golden (to coin a small pun) on TV as the result of a Nielsen bonanza that I had little to do with...beyond lending it my name, that is. As a result, the current CBS series isn't really Golden Years, after all. The official copyrighted name of the show is Stephen King's Golden Years, which sounds like a documentary about my retirement.

In the end, Richard Rubinstein got Jeff Sagansky, entertainment president of CBS, to take a close look at Golden Years, and the show got a green light from the network...following one final, crucial compromise. CBS wanted a series that could go on and on (and on) if the audience liked it. I wanted only to tell the story of Harlan Williams, an elderly janitor who happens to get caught up in a disastrous secret experiment. We resolved it by creating a character, Terrilyn Spann, who if necessary could carry the series on when Harlan's tale was told. And although I wish Terry nothing but the best, I have to confess that it's still Harlan I care about. And because even his story can't be completely told in the eight-hour summer run of the series, I'm hoping people will like Golden Years well enough to bring it back for a full run.

What is a full run, anyway? Well, I still believe there's a place on TV for long, complex stories — electronic novels, if you will — that exist in that medium alone and have a beginning, a middle, and an end. Who knows; maybe they will be some of the best-sellers of the 21st century.

I can hear the literary critics screaming now.