They drastically play with King’s setup, jumping around in time in ways that are going to throw fans off, but the result is a premiere that feels more focused than it could have (and also more focused than the miniseries) by saving major characters for future episodes. It’s a very promising beginning that just happens to have the nerve to call itself “The End.”ĭirector and co-writer Josh Boone ( The New Mutants) takes source material that sprawls across multiple locations and characters and pares it down in the premiere to focus on two arcs driven by two very different men: Harold Lauder (Owen Teague) and Stu Redman (James Marsden). It’s too soon to tell whether the topicality is a boon or a hindrance because it hits too close to home, but the premiere is confident genre television, something that feels like it’s already standing on its own, just loyal enough to the source while also restructuring and reshaping parts of King’s epic novel.
Fans of the book will know that this ambitious narrative won’t always be so focused on a population-decimating pandemic, but the series premiere has to deal with a lot of talk of contagions, coughing victims, and lines like “make the Spanish Flu look like a sham” - it’s all scarily reminiscent of the real world in 2020. Forty-two years after it was first published and 26 years after the last miniseries version, Stephen King’s The Stand arrived this week on CBS All Access to enthrall a new generation in ways that the producers couldn’t have possibly imagined when it went into production.
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