Stephen King’s books have provided plenty of fodder for film and television over the years, with It, Carrie, and The Shining terrifying audiences over the years.
The Stand, a nine-episode CBS All Access miniseries that premiered in December, is the second attempt at bringing King’s 1978 novel to TV screens. It was originally adapted in 1994, when King penned a screenplay that aired on ABC in an eight-hour miniseries.
A lot has changed in the interim 26 years, with probably the biggest difference being that the plot has become much more relatable. The Stand begins with a powerful new flu virus spreading around the earth, leaving devastation in its wake.
This bug is much more potent than COVID-19, however — it has more than a 99% fatality rate. The rapid spread quickly eliminates communities, leaving only a handful of immune people alive.
Those survivors also experience an eerie twist on top of the pandemic. They start having dreams that feature one of two figures: the benevolent “Mother Abagail” Freemantle (played by Whoopi Goldberg in this version) and the wicked Randall Flagg, also known as the “Dark Man” (portrayed by Alexander Skarsgard).
Eventually, these dreams lead the survivors of the pandemic to seek out both figures in two locales: Boulder, Colorado, and Las Vegas, Nevada. This sets the two communities on a collision course.
As the tale is one of King’s most celebrated early novels, one can hardly blame longtime fans for anxiously scrutinizing this new series. But by browsing online communities, one may find a chilly reception among many King devotees.
Most controversial is the decision by the showrunners to depart from the book’s linear plot. Both the novel and the 1993 series began with the initial outbreak and then transitioned to the survivors making their way to their respective communities. They both ended with the confrontation between the two.
The CBS series decides to do away with this chain of progression, telling the story of the initial outbreak and all of the main characters through flashbacks instead. This disjointed style serves to spoil much of the character development that a person would have otherwise had to digest in over 800 pages, the length of the novel.
Perhaps it’s a defensible choice, given that they’re trying to tell this lengthy story in just nine episodes, but it also removes much of the tension from the plot.
The viewers know what life is like when a global threat appears. We’ve lived that life for the past year. The uncertainty and panic are very real, even if COVID-19 has a fraction of the fatality rate of King’s fictional flu. Our routines are altered, and our lives are thrown out of balance. We spend much more time thinking about our mortality, and we take great pains to watch over our loved ones.
But CBS’s version of The Stand doesn’t deliver the same sense of dread and panic. The only glimpse into what life was like before the survivors start gathering in Boulder and Las Vegas comes through brief vignettes about their lives before everything went down the drain.
To be sure, the actors picked for the task perform it capably. James Marsden gives us a very competent Stu Redman, the Texas-based everyman who is one of the initial people exposed to the virus and is quickly shuttled away to government facilities to be isolated. Owen Teague plays the menacing Harold Lauder, a bullied loner who pines for his next-door neighbor Frannie Goldsmith (Odessa Young). Both of them happen to survive the plague.
It’s possible the showrunners reflected on the events of 2020 and decided people wouldn’t want to watch an epic about society collapsing under the weight of a killer pandemic in a world that was badly battered by a real one. That would be one justification for a rushed reedit.
But in denying these characters the benefit of a full arc of development and denying the audience the benefit of watching the world they inhabit slowly fall apart, this adaptation strips the plot of oomph. Viewers quickly know who lives to the final act and who doesn’t. There is little mystery about the choices the characters will make.
Take, for instance, the outbreak of the virus at the Project Blue research facility in California. In a television series that was willing to give the plot breathing room, the showrunners could have given people a deeper dive into how Charlie Campion, the Army soldier who escapes from the facility, carrying the virus with him, decided to panic and flee with his family.
But in the series we’re given here, that sequence unfolds over just a couple of minutes at the end of the first episode. There is little attention paid to the sheer weight of Campion’s actions, considering that he just signed the death warrants of 99% of the human race. The rest of that episode jumps around to different points in the timeline. There’s no suspense about what’s about to happen to the world as the young soldier barrels down a highway with his family.
That isn’t to say that The Stand is unwatchable. But it’s a much more lightweight series than what the material it is based on could have produced. Fans of King who pine for his stories to be taken more seriously when translated to screens will be disappointed.
Zaid Jilani is a freelance journalist.
