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Jake Epping (James Franco) is an English teacher at a school in Maine in the year 2011. He spends time at a diner run by Al Templeton (Chris Cooper). One day, Al tells Jake the secret of the diner—it contains a portal to 1960. Al has been travelling through the portal, spending as much time in the past as possible in an effort to get to the titular date and stop the assassination of John F. Kennedy. He hasn’t made it, and the journey has taken a toll, giving Al cancer. You see the past fights against revisionism. Al is going to die shortly but he wants Jake to take on this journey. Jake agrees, travelling back almost a half-century and essentially settling down in Texas, where he plans to spy on Lee Harvey Oswald (Daniel Webber). He can’t just kill him because what if he wasn’t the lone gunman? So, he has to know for sure that stopping Lee will stop the assassination, and that’s going to take time.

Of course, time allows the human element to intercede in our best laid plans, and Jake meets a few important people. First, after a riveting encounter in episode two in which Jake tries to stop a murderer (Josh Duhamel), he meets a bartender named Bill (George MacKay), who learns his secret and joins him on his journey, pretending to be Jake’s brother (and causing other problems along the way). More importantly, he meets another teacher named Sadie (Sarah Gadon), with whom he falls in love. Will his feelings for Sadie dissuade him from his journey? What happens to Bill when all of this over? And will saving Kennedy really make for a better 2016?

Clearly, there’s more than enough material here narratively for an event series, but “11.22.63” starts to spin its wheels around episode three. I didn’t read the book, but it’s easy to see how King could use his prose to maintain the urgency of Jake’s quest or even the folksy charm of his new existence in ways that just don’t translate to the small screen adaptation. There’s a ticking clock element of “11.22.63” and the producers can’t decide to how to handle it narratively. It would almost have been more interesting if they discarded the “overall mission” of Jake’s journey for an episode or two and just let us get to know Sadie and the other people in his new life. Instead, the project feels kind of torn between its purposes for a few episodes, unsure if it’s a character piece or a “Twilight Zone” riff and not really enough of either. The piece comes alive again when Sadie’s ex-husband (a menacing T.R. Knight) becomes a crucial character, but it never quite regains the confidence of the first two episodes, even in its gotcha finale.

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