The premise of “11.22.63” is simple. The miniseries, based on the 2011 novel by Stephen King and recently released in one big chunk on Hulu, asks the tantalizing question: If you could travel back in time, what would you change? For Al Templeton (Chris Cooper), a local diner owner, the answer is clear — if you stopped the assassination of John F. Kennedy, the world would be a better place. Bobby Kennedy wouldn’t run for president if his brother hadn’t been killed, leading to his own assassination. And if Lyndon B. Johnson hadn’t stepped into office following that fateful morning in Dallas, the war in Vietnam wouldn’t have escalated the way it did, and the men we sent over wouldn’t have died for nothing.Templeton is a lonely soul, and his travels back and forth in the time machine that mysteriously appeared in the closest of his diner have made him weak and older. Each time he enters the closet, it shoots him back to 1958. But years living in the past represent only minutes in the present, and his time is running out.He decides to enlist Jake Epping (James Franco), a failed writer and current teacher who helps janitors get their G.E.D.s. Recently divorced, Jake spends too much time in the diner (his ex-wife finds him slumped in a booth, eating a hamburger, when she wants him to sign the divorce papers) and shares a close bond with Templeton. After Jake notices that Templeton has started to age rapidly, the old man shows him the secret closet and explains his mission to change history. Since Templeton has become too frail to complete what he started, he sends Jake in his place.The rest plays out much as you might expect. There is the typical, “Back to the Future”-type complications of time travel — by changing the past you are, of course, changing the future — and procedural thrills of figuring out how they are going to, first, discover who exactly killed Kennedy, and then stop them. Along the way Jake gains a sidekick named Bill (George MacKay), a small-town bartender who forces his way into Jake’s life, and secures a job, using a fake name and references, at a local high-school close to where Lee Harvey Oswald lives. There, he becomes friends — to the dismay of the small-minded teachers — with Mimi (Tonya Pinkins), an African-American employee at the school, and begins a relationship with Sadie (Sarah Gadon), the new school librarian.The series takes its time laying out the particulars. Jake is forced to spend five years in the past plotting his mission, and sometimes it feels like it takes just as long for the plot to move forward. There is an ill-advised subplot involving the tragic story of a former student of Jake’s, which may have worked in the novel (I haven’t read it), but could have been cut out to make each episode swifter and more focused.It doesn’t help that installments in the series are often poorly directed. Kevin Macdonald (“The Last King of Scotland”) directed the competent pilot, but the next two episodes put journeymen television directors behind the camera — Fred Toye, who has a history of plugging away on J.J. Abrams’s television shows, and James Strong, who has credits on British programs such as “Broadchurch” and “Doctor Who” — and it shows (Abrams is one of the series’s executive producers). Everything is too polished, too plain — there is more thought put into the set design, and obsession with capturing the period detail, than in composing scenes with the camera.“11.22.63” is meant to appeal to a broad audience, and because of that there is a certain amount of mediocrity. Most people will consume all the episodes in quick succession and then forget about it, which, like time travel, is its own, distinctly modern form escaping reality.
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