Stephen King, and all of us, keep coming back to The Stand trying to get it right. First published in 1978, The Stand has been re-issued with an additional 500 or so pages in 1990, adapted as a miniseries in the early 90s, a comic series by Marvel from 2008 to 2012, and yet another miniseries this year courtesy of CBS All Access. Despite a solid start, the latest attempt at getting The Stand right falls apart and fails to do justice to the source material.
Adapting books to television or movies is hard. Even your average novel that only weighs in at 300 pages or so contains more than you can cram into a movie, and is either too much or too little to do well over the course of a series. Game of Thrones loosely adapted one book per season for HBO, and still shed characters and events, combined book characters into a single person to keep things simpler, and so forth.
The Stand tried to do too much in too little time, and even tried to introduce a new ending that was as unsatisfying as it was unnecessary. (If you haven’t watched the show and plan to, beware there are spoilers ahead.) Continue reading “Not with a bang, but a whimper: The Stand collapses”