IT: Welcome to Derry Explained: Pennywise, The Shining, and the Stephen King Universe Coming Together

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Derry, Maine has always been more than a town. In the world of Stephen King, it is a wound, a festering, ancient thing that refuses to close. And with IT: Welcome to Derry, the prequel series that premiered on HBO in October 2025, that wound has been cracked wide open for the first time on television.

Set in 1962, twenty-seven years before the Losers Club ever picked up a rock or spoke the name Pennywise, the show follows a group of newcomers to Derry as a young boy vanishes and very bad things begin to unspool. But this is no simple rehash. This is a show with ambitions that stretch far beyond a single story. It is, in the most meaningful sense, the first real attempt to build a Stephen King connected universe on screen, and it pulls it off.

The Season 1 finale drew 6.5 million viewers in its first three days, with a global average approaching 20 million viewers per episode, making it one of the biggest HBO Max series debuts of all time, behind only House of the Dragon and The Last of Us. A second season is not officially greenlit as of early 2026, but HBO CEO Casey Bloys has confirmed it is "not in limbo at all," with the Muschiettis actively developing the story for a planned 1935-set Season 2. For King fans, for horror devotees, and for anyone who has ever suspected that Derry, Castle Rock, Shawshank, and the Overlook Hotel all exist in the same terrible cosmos, Welcome to Derry is the confirmation you have been waiting for.

The Pennywise origin story King fans have waited decades for

Welcome to Derry is a direct prequel to Andy Muschietti's 2017 film IT and its 2019 sequel IT Chapter Two, themselves adaptations of King's landmark 1986 novel. Bill Skarsgård returns as Pennywise, and the show uses his presence not as nostalgia but as genuine origin excavation.

One of the series' most quietly devastating reveals concerns the true nature of Bob Gray, the name the entity calls itself in King's novel. For decades, readers and viewers have wondered who Bob Gray actually was. Welcome to Derry answers that question with chilling confidence: Bob Gray was a real human being, a circus performer who became Pennywise the Dancing Clown in 1908. The ancient shapeshifting entity witnessed his popularity, recognized the power of that particular terror, and absorbed the form. The cosmic horror became the clown. The clown became the nightmare.

This is King lore delivered with the author's blessing. Co-creator Jason Fuchs confirmed that Stephen King participated as a collaborator on the series, and that the Pennywise origin was vetted and approved by King himself. King publicly declared that the final two episodes were, in his words, "dynamite."

Derry isn't just where the story takes place. Derry is the monster. Pennywise is only its most visible face.

Dick Hallorann, The Shining, and the most historic crossover in King adaptation history

If there is one creative choice that makes Welcome to Derry something genuinely historic in Stephen King adaptation history, it is the central role of Dick Hallorann, played with quiet magnetism by Chris Chalk.

King fans know Hallorann from The Shining, the beloved Overlook Hotel head chef who recognizes young Danny Torrance's psychic gift and pays a terrible price for returning to help him. He reappears decades later in Doctor Sleep, as the guiding spirit who teaches an adult Danny how to lock his darkest visions away in a mental box. But in Welcome to Derry, set more than a decade before Danny Torrance is even born, we meet Hallorann as a young military man, already burdened by powers he cannot fully control, already haunted, already dangerous to those in authority who want to weaponize what he carries.

The show introduces his mental lockbox, first referenced in Doctor Sleep, and shows us the moment it begins to fracture under the psychic weight of Derry and Pennywise's influence. His abusive grandfather, his isolation, and his extraordinary sensitivity all receive new context here. And by the season's end, the breadcrumbs are deliberately, unmistakably laid: Hallorann is heading toward Colorado. Toward the Overlook. Toward the events that will define and ultimately end him.

The series has officially confirmed it also serves as a prequel to Stanley Kubrick's 1980 film adaptation of The Shining, a remarkable piece of continuity given the creative tension that has always existed between Kubrick's film and King's novel. The connective tissue is Hallorann, and Chris Chalk carries that weight with extraordinary grace. The Rotten Tomatoes critical consensus specifically called out Chalk's performance alongside Skarsgård and the younger cast members as among the season's strongest work.

The Hanlons, The Black Spot, and Derry's history of human evil

Among the new characters in 1962 Derry is Will Hanlon, the father of Mike Hanlon, the one member of the Losers Club who chose to remain in Derry as an adult and serve as the town's unofficial historian. In King's novel, the Hanlon family history is woven into Derry's past through the tragedy of The Black Spot, a Black-owned jazz club burned to the ground by a local hate group in 1930. Hallorann's family was there. It was one of Derry's many cyclical horrors.

Welcome to Derry shows us Will Hanlon navigating a 1962 Derry where the supernatural evil of Pennywise runs parallel to the very human evils of racism and institutional violence. The horror is layered deliberately. The show earns the weight of the Hanlon family legacy by giving Will a story that matters independently, knowing full well we understand where his son will one day stand.

The series also features Juniper Hill Asylum, the psychiatric institution that appears in IT Chapter Two, the Castle Rock TV series, and across multiple King novels including The Tommyknockers and 11/22/63. It is one of King's most reliable shared-universe landmarks, and its presence here is a deliberate geographic anchor.

Shawshank, Maturin, and The Dark Tower connection

Welcome to Derry makes pointed use of Shawshank State Prison, Maine's most infamous fictional institution, first introduced in King's 1982 novella Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption. A character in the series is sentenced to Shawshank, escaping via a bus accident. It is a small thread, but in King's universe, small threads lead to great dark places.

More tantalizing still are the teases of Maturin, the ancient turtle deity who serves as the benevolent counterpart to Pennywise's destructive entity in the novel's cosmology. Maturin is one of the Guardians of the Beam in The Dark Tower series, King's magnum opus and the connective spine of his entire fictional multiverse. His absence from the 2017 films was a notable omission. His presence in Welcome to Derry, even in symbolic glances, signals that this series has bigger ambitions than a straight prequel. The Dark Tower stands at the center of all things, and Welcome to Derry is the first screen adaptation that genuinely seems to know it.

The psychic continuum: Welcome to Derry and The Institute

In a parallel development that feels too meaningful to be coincidence, 2025 also saw the premiere of a TV adaptation of King's 2019 novel The Institute on MGM+. The two shows, unconnected in production and airing on different networks, share a remarkable thematic and mythological thread: children with psychic abilities, government programs attempting to weaponize those abilities, and small towns hiding terrible secrets beneath ordinary life.

The Institute features children with telekinetic and telepathic powers that echo throughout King's work the Shine, the psychic gift that connects Danny Torrance, Dick Hallorann, and now Hallorann's younger self in Welcome to Derry. The suggestion that these abilities exist within a shared psychic continuum, that every sensitive person in King's universe is tuned to the same terrible frequency, gives both shows an added layer of resonance when watched together.

What comes next: the three-season roadmap

As of early 2026, HBO has not issued a formal Season 2 greenlight, but the creative team and network have made clear it is a matter of when, not if. Andy Muschietti has confirmed a three-season plan: Season 2 would travel back to 1935, covering the Bradley Gang massacre and the burning of The Black Spot, while Season 3 would push all the way back to 1908 and the origins of Bob Gray himself.

Each season goes back 27 years, mirroring the novel's structure of Pennywise waking every 27 years to feed, and telling the story in reverse, which the Season 1 finale made clear is entirely intentional. There is a reason this story is being told backwards, and the deeper the seasons go, the clearer that reason will become.

Lurking in the background, still in development, is a Dark Tower series with Mike Flanagan attached, the filmmaker behind Doctor Sleep, Gerald's Game, and The Life of Chuck. If Welcome to Derry is the foundation and The Dark Tower is the sky, then what is being built right now in King's universe is something fans have dreamed about for decades: a genuine, authoritatively connected mythology on screen.

The town that eats its own

What IT: Welcome to Derry ultimately achieves, beyond the scares, beyond the lore drops, beyond the mythology, is a portrait of Derry as something genuinely, comprehensively evil. Not just haunted. Evil. A town that generates cruelty the way other places generate weather.

Pennywise feeds off fear. But Welcome to Derry insists that Pennywise also cultivates it. He is embedded in the town's cycles of racism, violence, silence, and complicity. Every act of human cruelty in 1962 Derry is food. Every look-away, every closed door, every authority figure who knows and does nothing, all of it nourishes IT. The cosmic horror and the human horror are not separate. They are the same organism.

That is a profoundly King idea, and it is one of the most faithful interpretations of his work ever put to screen. For a horror audience that lives in the dark with these stories, that dwells on what they mean and why they persist, Welcome to Derry is essential viewing. Not just because it is scary, though it is. But because it is finally, fully serious about the world Stephen King built, and because it understands that world well enough to expand it.

Derry is waiting. The clown is eternal. And the universe is bigger than you think.

Fear & Wine covered the whole season! You can listen to episode 1 HERE

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