Despite the harsh title, I don't think it would be fair to give this show a rating, since I haven't seen it in 20 years. It's one of a glut of horror anthology shows I tuned in to from 2000-2002, the others being Night Visions and the Twilight Zone reboot. Apart from a handful of standout episodes across all three series, they were generally disappointing and were all cancelled after only one season.
The "hook" of The Fearing Mind was that the main character is a Stephen King-level horror writer named Bill Fearing (how clever). When I say Stephen King level, I mean he's famous and people approach him for his autograph. Okay, fine, there are only like ten novelists in the world who get recognized in public, but I guess it's the conceit of the show that Bill Fearing is one of them...except that he's not even a novelist. He only writes short stories. And, sorry, but no way in hell do writers get famous for short stories, at least not in the twentieth century. Even Clive Barker, who wrote probably the most famous and influential collections of horror short fiction of the past fifty years (The Books of Blood) has said that short stories only get about 10% of the attention that novels get. So yeah, not buying it, but let's move on.
From what I remember, the episodes cross-cut between Bill Fearing dealing with the vagaries of his quiet domestic life with his family and the current story he's writing, which the audience sees play out like a PG version of Tales From the Crypt. I'm not one to say that horror can only be truly frightening if it's R-rated (bite-sized horror stories like "The last man on Earth is sitting alone in his room; suddenly, he hears a knock on the door" are completely G-rated and also terrifying) but you sure do need a sense of imagination and invention to make a story truly creepy while also appropriate for the Fox Family audience. I was only 13 when I watched this--pretty easy to scare--but I don't remember any of the horror stories, so clearly they didn't make much impact either way.
I remember giving up on the show after an episode where Bill is convinced to try writing on a computer--he writes all his stories longhand, you see. Hilarity ensues as he tries to grapple with this newfangled technology and ultimately the computer eats his story for no reason and he throws the monitor out the window. Ha ha. #relatable, am I right? I mean, come on. My parents were on the precipice of 40 at this time and still knew how to save a Word document. (Now, if he couldn't figure out how to set up the printer, that might be more believable.) It just felt like such a tired, dated attempt at humor even then.
But, hey. I do wish the show was available now, even though I really disliked it at the time. Just for nostalgia's sake. Apparently it was produced by the Jim Henson Company--a fact I knew not until looking it up just now--so if they ever set up their own streaming service, maybe it'll pop up on there.
