A numbness to the pain

Before it was put through the Americanizer, “Stephen King’s Kingdom Hospital,” which debuts tonight on ABC, was a Danish miniseries called “The Kingdom” directed by Lars von Trier.

“The Kingdom” (1994), which roughly coincides with Von Trier’s dual conversion to Catholicism and low-tech filmmaking, was a jittery, nicotine-colored creep show with a cheap paperback premise: A hospital built on ancient marshland is haunted by the ghosts of the people who died there. (Or, “Dead Men Can’t Sue for Malpractice, But They Can Chew Your Leg Off in the Sleep Lab.”)

Eerie and darkly funny, the Danish series satirized secular faith in reason and science over spirituality. The series marked Von Trier’s turn away from the highhanded formalism of previous films such as “Zentropa” (1991) toward a low-budget, free-form immediacy. This has been abandoned in its American version in favor of a more formulaic approach.

For U.S. audiences, King has done something curious with the source material, keeping the existing story, more or less, as background and inserting himself in it. The 15-hour miniseries retains the original’s open-ended structure. But by inserting a Very Important Patient into the narrative, King has fundamentally changed Von Trier’s format, which dispensed with the gruesome-pathology-of-the-week formula to focus instead on the building, one seismically unstable pile of bricks and the doctors who worked there.

I wouldn’t dwell on the Von Trier version if King or ABC had made up their own haunted hospital, or changed the name, or even just foregone that proprietary apostrophe. But it seems only fair to point out that Stephen King is the guy who was reported to have said he remade the modern classic “The Shining” because he didn’t think Stanley Kubrick’s version was very good. So maybe a comparison is in order after all.

In Von Trier’s original, a hospital is beset by a string of paranormal incidents -- a phantom ambulance pulls up to the emergency room every night and disappears, a little girl is heard crying in the elevator shaft and a pregnant doctor’s fetus develops at warp speed. And Mrs. Drusse, a psychic patient, enlists the help of Dr. Hook and her son, an orderly, to help her lead the hospital’s lost souls to a peaceful rest. Meanwhile, Dr. Helmer, the Swedish head of neurosurgery and the embodiment of hubristic science, leaves a little girl severely brain damaged. Unable to admit his mistake, he is nevertheless driven to find a supernatural solution to his problem: He hops a plane to Haiti to learn how to turn his nemesis, Dr. Hook, the only person who knows his secret, into a zombie.

A quote on the video box described the Danish “The Kingdom” as “ ‘ER’ on acid,” something King mentioned while describing his own version in a recent New York Times interview. But “Stephen King’s Kingdom Hospital” (on which Von Trier is credited as an executive producer) seems more like “The Kingdom” on painkillers after a three-day coke binge at drama school. Aside from the Danish original’s credit sequence, in which the phantom ambulance races down the highway to a hard-driving theme song apparently sung by Vikings, the original “Kingdom” bore about as much resemblance to “ER” on acid as “ER” does to an emergency room on Earth.

Beginning with the introduction, an eerie, fog-shrouded sequence of textile workers at a bleaching pond, the remake seems at first to closely follow the original. (Except for the voice-over narration, which swaps a morose Danish narrator for what sounds like Patrick Stewart doing Vincent Price, but is actually Stephen King.)

Very quickly, however, the introductory sequence devolves into a plodding dramatization of the hospital’s compound curses: Built on the site of a Civil War-era children’s sweatshop that made the uniforms Union soldiers wore to fight slavery, it burned down, trapping most of the children inside and becoming a de facto ancient Indian burial ground -- sans Indians.

Andrew McCarthy plays hot young neurosurgeon (quiet and amiable in Von Trier’s version) Dr. Hook. McCarthy’s Hook is so hot, in fact, he can maintain a cavalier attitude toward brain surgery and still come across as respectful, professional and smolderingly sexy at once. (In an unrelated note: Rob Lowe will star in TNT’s remake of Stephen King’s “Salem’s Lot” early this summer. This seemed worth noting as it would seem there’s some kind of Stephen King-Brat Pack harmonic convergence thing going on. Perhaps Judd Nelson is “Cujo”?)

Bruce Davison plays Dr. Stegman, an arrogant, Jaguar-driving Bostonian who hates the local yokels. (Somehow this conceit is not as funny as the Volvo-driving Dr. Helmer, who was fond of raising his fists to the heavens and cursing the Danish scum at the end of each episode of “The Kingdom.”) Diane Ladd plays Mrs. Druse, who along with an S in her name also lost her adorably devious personality, while retaining all the edge of a Grandma’s Cookie.

The first episode spends most of its time on the story of Peter Rickman (Jack Coleman, who played Steven Carrington in “Dynasty”), a rich and famous artist who is hit by a van one morning as he jogs down a rural highway. It is, apparently, a more or less accurate account of King’s own accident a few years ago as he remembers it. Whether this means that King engaged in telepathic chats with a couple of woodland creatures, notably a computer-generated aardvark, I don’t know. But the overall result is that Von Trier’s sharply hilarious satirical ghost story has wound up all but buried under mounds of the macabre goofiness and senseless melodrama.

“Stephen King’s Kingdom Hospital” is not without its compelling moments; Peter’s extended wait for help while lying by the side of the road is unexpected and chilling, considering what we know about King’s own experience. The character of the stoner hit-and-run driver, who seems to be headed for some sort of reckoning, is also interesting.

But King’s tics and mannerisms, not to mention the cliches and conventions of network dramas, practically leap off the screen, underscoring that at the height of American TV’s Baroque period, all product must conform to this aesthetic or risk immediate rejection, like an incompatible liver. Why else would we remake foreign hits instead of just airing them? Because we have the technology to turn anything at all into highly stylized, yet comfortingly familiar-looking sausage as a Steadicam lovingly captures the moment.

The quietly disturbing, darkly comic masterpiece has been refashioned into something slick and stylized -- one that looks like Disney’s Haunted Mansion, but sounds like “Days of Our Lives.”

When Peter’s wife, Natalie (Suki Kaiser), gets the news that her husband has been in an accident, she tells the caller it must be a mistake, looks up at the TV to see the story has already made the local news, shrieks to swelling violins, and runs out the door so that Dr. Hook may deliver Peter’s diagnosis and three solid minutes of medical jargon with a furiously furrowed brow.

“Dr. Hook,” Natalie asks, desperately trying to out-furrow him, “when my husband wakes up will he be quadriplegic?”

“We’re hopeful that the. Spine is only compressed,” says Hook, who has the habit of putting periods in the most unlikely places. “If that’s the case then. Your husband may recover some. Use of his arms and. His legs but in this type. Of accident we are very worried the. Damage may be permanent.”

“Permanent? Oh my God!”

“I’m so sorry.”

Well, at least somebody is. At the end of the original, a tuxedo-clad Von Trier stood in front of a drawn curtain and explains that “The Kingdom” is meant to represent the kingdom of the imagination, and that in God’s world, one must take the good with the evil. Maybe he was talking about the two versions of his show. Maybe not. But “Stephen King’s The Kingdom” doesn’t exactly come out on the bright side of this particular dialectic.

*

‘Stephen King’s Kingdom Hospital’

Where: ABC

When: Premieres 9-11 tonight.

Rating: The network has rated the miniseries TV-14LV (may not be suitable for children younger than 14, with advisories for coarse language and violence).

Andrew McCarthy...Dr. Hook

Sally Druse...Diane Ladd

Bruce Davison...Dr. Stegman

Ed Begley Jr....Dr. Jesse James

Jack Coleman...Peter Rickman

Executive producers Stephen King, Mark Carliner, Lars von Trier. Director Craig Baxley. Writer King, based on the miniseries “The Kingdom,” by Von Trier and Niels Vorsel.