Seeing Mr. Brosnan playing a blocked writer in this A&E mini-series, based on Mr. King’s 1998 novel, “Bag of Bones,” you have hopes that his charm, intelligence and quiet sexiness will have rubbed off on the production. Those wishes fade away well before the end of the four-hour show (which begins on Sunday night), even before the scene in which a ghost argues with a tree over the writer’s fate. 

That’s not to imply that there’s anything especially silly or cheesy about this film. It’s an entirely respectable adaptation, which of course is a large part of the problem. Handsomely shot and deliberately paced, it has a superficially cinematic quality, but it doesn’t have the storytelling juice to keep you engaged in Mr. King’s convoluted multi-ghost story. 

Characters have been diminished and plot lines condensed from the more-than-500-page novel, but the bones of Mr. King’s story remain. Mike Noonan (Mr. Brosnan), a prolific New York novelist, finds himself unable to write after the sudden death of his wife, Jo (Annabeth Gish). Needing a change of scene — and wondering whether the child Jo was carrying was his — Mike heads to their lake house in Maine, a place he hasn’t seen in several years but that she visited regularly. 

At the same time he begins to get signs, in the form of ringing phones and moving refrigerator magnets, that Jo may still be around and trying to tell him something. These scenes are played not for straight horror but with a benign, almost comic mood: After he gets over the initial shock, Mike would like nothing better than to have his wife around to lean on, even if he can’t physically lean on her. 

Jo isn’t the only ghost trying to get through to him, however, and some of the others aren’t so friendly, particularly that of a blues singer (the ubiquitous Anika Noni Rose) who disappeared 70 years before. 

Mike’s visitations follow a pattern: He hears a noise that shouldn’t be there — a scratching sound, a ringing bell, a sudden snatch of “Motherless Child” — and, without fail, stops what he’s doing to track down its source. It’s a clever metaphor for the writer’s plight: continually interrupted and too easily distracted, even when the distractions are invisible. 

Mr. King’s novel combined a supernatural horror story and whodunit with a straightforward portrayal of the anxieties of the writer’s life. The first and better half of the mini-series is suffused with Mike’s grief and desperation over the loss of his muse; his eagerness to believe in ghosts, to submerge himself in what could be delusions, is an extreme version of the suspension of disbelief practiced by all readers and writers of fiction. 

But there’s a lot of story to get through, including murders, car chases, a curse, a custody battle and an incipient romance for Mike with a local young woman (Melissa George of “In Treatment”). The interest in fiction writing as anything other than a plot device recedes, and the show’s second half becomes a routine murder mystery, with ghosts. 

The explanations, when they come, are violent, sordid and anticlimactic. Mr. King’s original, ambiguous ending is eliminated so that things can end on a more affirmative note. 

The King veteran Mick Garris (“Sleepwalkers,” the TV version of “The Shining”), directing from a screenplay by Matt Venne, delivers some effective jolts of horror early on but seems to lose his touch as the story makes progressively less sense. The final ghostly appearance, which takes place in a bathtub, is more giggly than scary. 

For those who are wondering, the title of Mr. King’s novel comes from a line of Thomas Hardy that Mike paraphrases: “Compared to the dullest human being walking on the earth, the most brilliantly drawn character, in any novel, is nothing more than a bag of bones.” Mr. Brosnan, who is rarely off screen, makes sure that Mike is more than that, maintaining his poise and his Irish twinkle to the end.