Simmons, Heather Graham, and Hamish Linklater play supporting roles - and most of them do their level best to ground a series that leans increasingly into the heightened and grotesque. Obviously a strong ensemble of actors has been assembled for this version of The Stand - J.K. Harold, still bitter about being rejected by Fran, settles in Colorado as well, as does Nadine (Amber Heard), a woman whose loyalties and ethics are malleable enough to bend into a question mark. Stu, too, will eventually head to Boulder, where he and four others - Fran, sociology professor Glen Bateman (Greg Kinnear), musician Larry Underwood (Jovan Adepo), and Nick Andros (Henry Zaga), who is a nonspeaking deaf person - will function as the five overseers of the community, a role that Mother Abagail declares they are destined to serve. Within a short period of time, all of them and the rest of the town’s residents are dead, with only Harold and Fran surviving and, eventually, hitting the road.Įlsewhere, Stu Redman (James Marsden) of Arnette, Texas, where the outbreak of the virus first began, is taken into custody by federal researchers who determine that he is immune to an illness that is practically instantly fatal in others. Harold’s mother and his sister are, notably, ill.
This scrawny teenager is one of the many tasked with tossing those bodies into massive graves.įrom there, The Stand launches back to five months prior in Ogunquit, Maine, where Harold is living in normal times, which, for him, involves spying on his former babysitter Fran Goldsmith (Odessa Young) and being bullied. Harold dashes out of the building, sickened by what he sees. The first episode begins with a grisly scene in which volunteers, including Harold Lauder (Owen Teague), are outfitted in masks and goggles as they enter a church filled with corpses, still more of the dead who constantly need to be buried. This timeline is generally clear enough for viewers to follow, but there are definitely scenes that make one question, for at least a few seconds, where and when the show is in place and time. Rooted in a post-viral-spread present, when that mini-society has been formed in Colorado, the episodes feature multiple flashbacks to four or five months prior as it pieces together how the many principal characters made their way to Boulder and elsewhere. The Stand, which completed the bulk of its production in March, before the COVID-caused shutdowns, is a big, sprawling piece of work, and the way this version is structured makes it unwieldy. As rendered in this iteration of King’s epic, that mix of realism and fantasy results in a disjointed, tonally inconsistent work that manages to both over-condense aspects of the original saga and overstay its welcome. As The Stand progresses, as has always been the case, it delves more and more into the conflicts among survivors who have settled in Boulder, Colorado, some of whom follow the guidance of Mother Abagail (Whoopi Goldberg), a 108-year-old woman with psychic and spiritual powers, and some of whom fall under the spell of Randall Flagg (Alexander Skarsgård), a demonic entity as adept at invading the subconscious of his disciples as Mother Abagail is. Those parallels are hard to ignore in this new series, but only in the first one or two episodes. While King’s story, adapted here by Josh Boone and showrunner Benjamin Cavell, is an exaggerated work of dystopian fiction, there are obvious parallels between its version of America and the one in which we have lived during the past 12 months. evil spiritual crisis born out of the health crisis and, for fun, some light government conspiracy. The Stand also focuses on disaffected men (and some women) seeking to blow up society in an expression of their rage Americans struggling to find hope in a country that has shut down in the most extreme manner possible a good vs. The 1978 novel, which inspired an ABC miniseries in 1994 prior to the new, nine-episode version debuting Thursday on CBS All Access, focuses on a global pandemic that wipes out a large portion of the population, which is obviously a relevant storyline to explore in 2020. This moment seems, on the surface, like the timeliest moment possible to unveil a new adaptation of Stephen King’s The Stand. James Marden, immune from illness, in The Stand.