Then he receives a message from a man claiming to be the Mercedes Killer, who drove through a crowd at a job fair years earlier, slaughtered 16 people with a Mercedes, and was never caught.Īs his former colleagues all urge him to leave the case to them, Bill finds himself caught in a web of obsession he can't escape, but the tension doesn't stop with him. Divorced, drinking too much, and losing his drive, Bill begins to think that his life almost isn't worth living anymore. When we meet him, though, 'adrift' starts to feel like an understatement. Mercedes the series follows retired detective Bill Hodges (Brendan Gleeson), a man who feels adrift in the world after leaving his life's work on the police force behind. To hunt this monster, King dreamed up a retired detective looking for a new sense of purpose in life, and the result was not just one novel, but a trilogy of hard-boiled crime stories unlike anything else in King's catalog. He began to imagine the act of violence not as something that happened in the heat of the moment (as was the case with the local story he saw), but as the premeditated plan of a monster who'd somehow managed to get away with the whole thing and go into hiding. What began as a short story about this brutal incident soon evolved into something more as King's imagination took over. I just knew that I wanted to write about it.'

As King explained during an event at UMass Lowell in 2012, after seeing a local news segment on the story, 'I thought to myself 'I want to write about this.' I didn't know why I wanted to write about it, or what I wanted to write about it. Mercedes began with something he encountered out in the real world, in this case, a news story about a person who drove their car through a crowd of people in line to apply for jobs at McDonald's. Before the first three episodes premiere on SYFY on March 16, here's what you need to know about the show. So, if you're still uninitiated to the world of Mr. If that's you, then the show's SYFY premiere might just be your chance to dig into this tense cat-and-mouse story of a retired cop and the brutal cold case he just can't leave behind. The series premiered on the Audience network all the way back in 2017 and more recently was moved over to NBCUniversal's new streaming service, Peacock, but no matter how available a show is, there are always outliers who mean to watch something but never actually find the time. Mercedes, the acclaimed crime drama based on Stephen King's novel of the same name, will make its debut on SYFY for viewers who perhaps haven't seen the more hard-boiled side of King's imagination.

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