Before he was James Bond, he was Remington Steele ... and he’s also a Stephen King fan, a boon to Pierce Brosnan in his return to television.

In recent years a star of such movies as “Mamma Mia!” and the Roman Polanski-directed “The Ghost Writer,” the actor had a previous link to the iconic horror novelist through some aspects of the 1992 film “The Lawnmower Man.” He revisits King territory by playing an author literally haunted by a tragic loss in the new A&E Network two-part movie “Stephen King’s Bag of Bones,” airing Sunday and Monday.

Brosnan channels King in portraying a writer, but the fictional wordsmith’s circumstances differ. After his wife (Annabeth Gish, “The X-Files”) is killed in an accident, creatively blocked Mike Noonan (Brosnan) retreats to Maine – famously King’s own stomping grounds – and becomes enmeshed in a custody battle between a child’s (Caitlin Carmichael) mother (Melissa George, “Alias”) and grandfather (William Schallert, “The Patty Duke Show”).

“Beverly Hills, 90210” alum Jason Priestley appears as Noonan’s agent, who hopes his client will start turning out books again soon. That could be helped or hindered by the supernatural experiences the writer begins having, some involving the spectre of a blues-era singer (Anika Noni Rose, “Dreamgirls”) with a traumatic history of her own.

“It wasn’t anything that was conscious; it was just the way it worked out,” Brosnan says of tackling another King tale. “This fit in really nicely with my schedule. Having said that, I’m a fan of Mr. King’s work. I hadn’t really thought about ‘The Lawnmower Man’ until I was reminded of it on the first day of doing this.”

Nearly every familiar King storytelling element is present in “Bag of Bones,” all the more cause for Brosnan to reason, “When you come to play King, you have to go full-tilt. You can’t shy away from what’s on the page, and if you look at the actors who have played King characters, they’re usually pretty assertive with their performances.”

Especially in the first half of “Bag of Bones,” when Brosnan has long sequences built largely on reactions to what his alter ego sees – or believes he’s seeing, whether he’s looking at a refrigerator or a coffin – his work is largely wordless and reactive, rather than holding to the tradition of delivering information to viewers through dialogue.

“For the first four weeks, almost, I was just by myself,” Brosnan confirms. “There were no other actors involved, and that was the challenge of the piece. How do you keep it in play with just one man and his fears and foibles and the persecuted state of his own mind?”