Today at New York Comic-Con, CBS brought a new, full trailer for its upcoming adaptation of Stephen King’s The Stand.
The series, about the titanic clash of good and evil in the aftermath of a deadly pandemic, is due out on CBS All Access on December 17th.
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The project has been in the works for several years now—long before the onset of the coronavirus pandemic. The series will run for 9 episodes, and will feature a new coda written by King. We got our first look at the series back in August with a very brief teaser that introduced us to Abagail Freemantle (Whoopi Goldberg) inviting a woman to join her at Hemingford Home.
This full teaser gives us quite a bit more of what to expect in the upcoming miniseries. A deadly pandemic sweeps across the world, destroying civilization as we know it. We see some glimpses of the collapse, and of the survivors coming together, mysteriously summoned by Freemantle, who has appeared in their dreams. She’s brought them to the Boulder Free Zone, to keep them safe.
We also see Frannie Goldsmith (played by Odessa Young), a young pregnant woman who’s been called by Freemantle, but who’s also hearing from another person—The Dark Man, aka Randall Flagg (played by Alexander Skarsgård). Where Freemantle represents the good, Flagg represents her polar opposite. We get a brief glimpse of Skarsgård as the character, and he looks positively creepy.
The series debuts on CBS All Access on December 17th.
That filled me with… meh. Which is not a good sign. I love that book.
@1: It may stand up as a story “inspired by” The Stand, especially with those actors. I infer a general theme that with the population reduced so very far and the social fabric in tatters, certain persons now have room to act. S.M. Stirling does something like it in Dies the Fire: you’ve got these little scattered groups whose individual, moment-by-moment decisions have broad and lasting consequences they can’t always predict or control, and you’ve also got no more pushback against certain doors being pushed open (to paraphrase one of his characters).
But, yes, I think that you can’t have an actual film of The Stand while omitting two major themes: the many-layered desperation of life in the ’70s, and the sheer WTFery that is American fundamentalist doctrine. And I don’t see either of those here.