Stephen King’s Favorite TV Shows According to His Twitter Raves
Emmys and Baftas are all very well, but the real accolade for the modern TV drama is a praise-tweet from author Stephen King. Here’s a list of his top Twitter recommendations.
“NOW WE’RE SUCKING DIESEL! If you don’t get it, you missed a great series.” Stephen King’s Mare of Easttown. You can bet he’d have had a take on the mystery identity of Line of Duty baddie ‘H’.)
Line of Duty isn’t alone in attracting King’s online praise; when the horror author watches a TV show he loves from inside the creepy Castle Rock devil shop he calls home, he lets his 6.5 million followers know about it. Below is a list of endorsements King has made on Twitter in recent years, from the usual sci-fi and horror suspects to a few less expected titles.
US MODERN CLASSICS
The Americans, Game of Thrones, Homeland, Sons of Anarchy and The Shield
In Stephen King’s house (inside Derry’s landmark water tower, The Standpipe) as of February 2018, only three shows were considered ‘appointment television’: FX Cold War spy drama Sons of Anarchy. Get it right, New York Times.
INTERNATIONAL DRAMA
Dark, Fauda, Hotel Beau Sejour, Les Revenants, Marianne, Money Heist, To The Lake, ZeroZeroZero
Nothing scares Stephen King, not even subtitles. When he’s relaxing in his converted alien spaceship half buried in the woods of Haven, Maine, he enjoys nothing more than streaming a foreign-language box-set. He particularly rates German sci-fi Money Heist is “a firecracker” while he found Italian-Anglo crime drama ZeroZeroZero “bone-shaking, chilling, terrifying, epic,” and King found it hard to believe it could be bettered. High praise.
BRITISH DRAMA
Black Mirror, Life on Mars, Line of Duty, The Stranger
From underneath his massive, transparent dome in Chester’s Mill, Stephen King will often enjoy a bit of British telly. Back in 2013, when it was still a Channel 4 show only just available worldwide on Netflix, King Tweeted that he loved future-tech anthology series told Den of Geek at the time that despite being a huge Stephen King fan, his reaction was characteristically muted:
“I think I probably smiled? That’s about as effusive as I get about anything, because whenever anything nice happens in the world I always expect something appalling to happen immediately afterwards.”
BBC crime-drama-with-a-time-travel-fantasy-twist Life on Mars is another British favourite that King described in September 2020 as one of his favourite shows of all time, “the kind you go to when you’re feeling sad.” That same year, he called Harlan Coben’s mystery thriller The Stranger, starring Richard Armitage, as an excellent, addictive mystery. King’s British TV crush of the moment of course, is BBC crime drama Line of Duty, which he praises for having a central Mulder/Scully-type vibe between main characters Steve Arnott and Kate Fleming.
US THRILLERS
Big Sky, Bosch, Designated Survivor, Escape at Dannemora, Fargo, Mindhunter, Perry Mason, The Good Fight, The Man in the High Castle, The Morning Show
After he’s finished all the two-finger KitKats from the minibar at Room 217 of The Overlook Hotel, where he lives, Stephen King puts a thriller on the TV. Crime thriller, political thriller, legal thriller, alt-history Philip K. Dick thriller… he has time for them all. King is a particular fan of ABC’s murder show Big Sky, which stars Ryan Philippe and The Man in the High Castle season four as “amazingly good”, challenging and involving.
HORROR & SUPERNATURAL
Black Summer, Dracula, The Haunting of Hill House, Servant, Stranger Things, THEM
When he’s not nursing kidnapped novelists back to health in the remote Colorado cabin where he lives, Stephen King goes in for a bit of scare-action on the TV. He called Mike Flanagan’s adaptation of Shirley Jackson’s Stranger Things, he described the first season as like “watching Steve King’s greatest hits” in a good way.
Next week on What Famous People are Watching: is Stanley Tucci really that big on the Westminster Dog Show, or is he more of a The Underground Railroad guy? We find out.
Written by
Louisa Mellor was the Den of Geek UK TV Editor from 2012-2025. She wrote about TV, film and books for Den of Geek from 2010, and…