My sister recently joked that she gave her husband a startlingly accurate rundown of the 1994 ABC TV miniseries, Stephen King’s The Stand. This was notable not due to her relative youth when this classic aired for the first time (she was about nine at the time), but because she’s never actually watched it. I was (and still am) the Stephen King fan in the family, and my begging for the miniseries on VHS paid off, it played in the background basically all the time..
So, I’m having a hard time reviewing the new, 2020 CBS take on King’s best story (yes, it’s the best). I’m too close to it, and unable to review it with fresh eyes. I was the kind of fun-loving teenager who insisted on reading The Stand while out to dinner at a nice restaurant. I’ve read it, listened to the audio book, watched the 1994 miniseries on VHS and DVD. I have the soundtrack; I’m not sure what my parents hated more, that or the sounds of Oregon Trail. I’m sure I still have a notebook filled with quotes from Glen Bateman. I visited colleges in Boulder and Colorado Springs, and have to consciously stop myself from responding with a hearty “We will, Stu!” whenever someone asks me to bear with them. Yes, my husband is a lucky guy.
I’m also having a hard time watching this version of The Stand. It’s boring, and I don’t think it’s just because I already know the story. I think the biggest issue is the flashbacks. Their approach to flashbacks turned the story into a big jumbled to-go Panera salad that you didn’t check util you got home and realized what a mess the whole thing actually is. Putting it in a nice bowl helps, but you’re always a little sick and regretful after.
I don’t blame the creators of this newest The Stand for using flashbacks, and can’t help but to wonder if it’s a nod to Lost (J.J. Abrams and Damon Lindelof are open about The Stand and its influence on their work). Lost is still the go-to example for using flashbacks to tell a complex story effectively. The show had its faults, but many of the episodes told beautiful stories and and of themselves, with tension escalating and intrigue piquing and plots both thickened and propelled forwarded. Over several flashbacks, we learned how Kate got to be as annoying as she was, how Sawyer got that chip on his shoulder, why Locke was so…Locke. You’d be the same if your own estranged father managed to con you for a kidney. And season four’s The Constant is arguably one of the best hours of TV ever put out there.
But we don’t get that with CBS’s The Stand. There’s no tension. There’s no intrigue. Nothing is titillated. Characters are not advanced; they’re so hollow, they leave only the most fleeting of impressions, like a fart in the wind. Maybe it’s a time issue; with nine hours, maybe it was wise to not bring up Lloyd Henried’s troubled history with starving rabbits, or Larry’s experience in the Central Park monkey house as a child. Instead, we’re shown that Lloyd was desperate enough to snack on Trask, and that Larry is not known for being a good guy, but there’s no “so what” to it. Similarly, Stu is apparently only there to advance information about the plague and the medical response, and later to advance information about Boulder to new comers. He doesn’t stand on his own, and seems pretty bemused at where he finds himself. And what happened to the Harold/Stu/Fran love-triangle? What about Fran’s diary? What about Fran’s fear that she waited too long, and that Stu falls for Dana? Any potential tension is dispelled in the first episode, when we see Stu and Fran happily visiting a food truck and running into Harold. I suppose we were supposed to be surprised that they ended up together, and wonder at how those two beautiful people picked each other, and maybe newcomers did feel that. Personally, I felt sleepy, and a little envious of Fran’s pouty lips.
While walking Lula this afternoon, I decided to listen to the intro to The Stand (complete and uncut) again. I got to the part where he’s explaining why he agreed to go along with the complete and uncut version. Something about the way that King described the Cliff Notes version of Hansel and Gretel struck a chord:
If all of the story is there, one might ask, then why bother? Isn’t it indulgence after all? It better not be; if it is, then I have spent a large portion of my life wasting my time. As it happens, I think that in really good stories, the whole is always greater than the sum of the parts. If that were not so, the following would be a perfectly acceptable version of “Hansel and Gretel”: Hansel and Gretel were two children with a nice father and a nice mother. The nice mother died, and the father married a bitch. The bitch wanted the kids out of the way so she’d have more money to spend on herself. She bullied her spineless, soft-headed hubby into taking Hansel and Gretel into the woods and killing them. The kids’ father relented at the last moment, allowing them to live so they could starve to death in the woods instead of dying quickly and mercifully at the blade of his knife. While they were wandering around, they found a house made out of candy. It was owned by a witch who was into cannibalism. She locked them up and told them that when they were good and fat, she was going to eat them. But the kids got the best of her. Hansel shoved her into her own oven. They found the witch’s treasure, and they must have found a map, too, because they eventually arrived home again. When they got there, Dad gave the bitch the boot and they lived happily ever after. The End.
I don’t know what you think, but for me, that version’s a loser. The story is there, but it’s not elegant. It’s like a Cadillac with the chrome stripped off and the paint sanded down to dull metal. It goes somewhere, but it ain’t, you know, boss.
Stephen King. The Stand (Kindle Locations 56-60). 1990. Random House LLC. Kindle Edition
It feels like a low blow to use Stephen King’s own words to critique a valiant attempt at adapting one of his most important and challenging works to TV in an era during which that requires more courage than ever, when any asshat with an internet connection can spout off about something about which they know basically nothing…but here we are. On the upside, I don’t think it’s bad, and it’s not a loser (that title is reserved for the 2017 rendition of the Dark Tower, which I hope to never acknowledge again). It’s just not, you know, boss.
One final musing: it’s highly ironic that they picked a man with Alexander Skarsgård’s face to play the man with no face.
