New adaptation of The Stand “isn’t…about a pandemic”

The producers behind the new version of The Stand talk about what they’re going for, while Stephen King reviews some of the MANY TV adaptations of his work.

Stephen King’s 1978 novel The Stand is about a respiratory disease that spreads across the world and wipes out over 99% of the population, leaving the few survivors to rebuild…or at least that’s I thought it was about before I heard Benjamin Cavell — who’s adapting the new book as a new miniseries for CBS All Access — talk about it with SyFy Wire.

“For me, for us, The Stand really isn’t a book about a pandemic, as strange as that sounds,” Cavell said. “It’s really about what comes after… this elemental struggle between good and evil or the forces of light and dark, since [fellow executive producer Taylor Elmore] and I don’t love to say ‘good and evil,’ because it feels simple and boring. I mean, it’s totally valid, and it certainly is there in the book, but it seems a little… I don’t know. The non-linear thing was, in part, we didn’t want to make people sit through three episodes of the world dying before we got to the meat of our story.”

"And look, Taylor and I love Outbreak and Contagion and all that stuff, but we have seen that, you know? We just didn’t feel like we needed to put people through episodes of that, in part because that’s really not when our story gets going. Our story really, in some ways, begins once the world is emptied out and these two groups of survivors start to coalesce around these two figures of Flagg and Mother Abagail, and those two sides are going to come together in this climactic confrontation."

King spends an awful lot of time in the book describing the horrors that the mad-made disease called Captain Trips wrecks on the American landscape, but the book does eventually get around to focusing on the stand-off between the benevolent Mother Abigail (Whoopi Goldberg) on the one side and the demonic Randall Flagg (Alexander Skarsgård) on the other. If you’re hoping for a straight retelling of King’s story, you’re out of luck; the structure is more twisty, with the story beginning with people rebuilding civilization before we flash back to its fall.

And that’s one way to tell it; King assumedly approves, because he wrote a new coda to the story that shines more light on what lead character Frannie Goldsmith (Odessa Young) is doing during the big finish, something we don’t know in the original.

“The coda, I’m excited for you to see it. I think it really adds to it,” Cavell said. “But the thing that [King] was kicking himself about, and the question that this will answer, in his mind, is, ‘Well, when does Frannie get her stand?’ As we know, she is, what, eight months pregnant; when they leave on the stand, she can’t go. But it was always, in King’s mind, a deficit of the book that one of its main heroes doesn’t kind of get to participate in its climax. So, without giving anything away about the coda, I will say that the thing that I think generated it or generated the need for it, at least in his mind, was that Frannie needed to have a stand of her own.”

The new version of The Stand is just another adaptation for King, who’s had a crazy number of his books adapted as movies or TV shows over the years, including another version of The Stand that aired on ABC in 1994.

Speaking to The New York Times, King gave his thoughts on several of those adaptations. Let’s go over some, starting with that earlier version of The Stand:

"Mick [Garris, with whom King has teamed on Sleepwalkers and other projects] directed everything, and I wrote everything, so there was never any sense of unevenness in the way they worked — it had one single style all the way through it […] Mick loved the book and was dedicated to the idea that we would just do the book, which is what we did. ABC spent a lot of money on it."

We can check in and see what he thinks of the other version after it wraps next year.

As long as we’re talking about cheesy ’90s King adaptations, how about the TV version of IT, with Tim Curry as Pennywise the Dancing Clown?

"I liked that series a lot, and I thought Tim Curry made a great Pennywise […] It scared the [expletive] out of a lot of kids at that time."

No word on how he feels about the more recent movie versions of IT.

Apparently great King books are all adapted twice, including The Shining: there’s Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 movie with Jack Nicholson, which King famously dislikes even though it might be the most iconic adaptation of anything he’s written; and the much lamer but more book-accurate TV version from 1997.

"King said that Steven Weber, the star of the ABC series, better grasped the character [in comparison to Jack Nicholson]. “He knew what he was supposed to be doing: He was supposed to express love for his family, and that the hotel just gradually overwhelms his moral sense and his love for his family.”King also praised Rebecca De Mornay’s performance as Wendy Torrance, which she “plays the way she’s written in the book,” as “the real reason I love that mini-series.”"

King really did not like the 2013 CBS adaptation of Under the Dome, about a dome that suddenly descends on a small town for seemingly no reason:

"[I]t went off the rails [and] descended into complete mediocrity […] It was a sad thing, but it didn’t bother me. I stopped watching after a while because I just didn’t give a [expletive]."

And finally, what did he think of the Hulu show Castle Rock, which brought in lots of King characters and them interact in the titular town?

"The people involved were big fans of those books, and I liked what they did quite a lot […] In the second season, they really got their feet under them. I would have liked to have seen it go on and grow a little bit."

The new version of The Stand kicks off this Thursday on CBS All Access!

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