FAIRFIELD-SUISUN, CALIFORNIA
Review: Stephen King modeled ‘The Stand’ on ‘Lord of the Rings.’ TV has done it no favors [Los Angeles Times]
As a story of a world-gutting flu pandemic, Stephen King’s “The Stand,” whose second, superior miniseries adaptation begins Thursday on CBS All Access, could not be more timely. And as a story of good and evil facing off for the usual high stakes — and of democracy versus autocracy, self-sacrifice versus narcissism — it also feels very on brand for 2020. Whether that makes people more or less inclined to watch, I couldn’t say.
I have reviewed a lot of King adaptations over the years, and apart from “The Shining,” my King reading consists entirely of preparing to review TV adaptations of Stephen King novels. Sometimes they are better than the books and sometimes worse. First published in 1978, at 840 pages, “The Stand” was updated in 1990 with a few hundred pages more, and you will excuse me, I hope, if in this case I do not take the reading on. I have researched the novel — there is a deep well of information out there in the digital universe — and have read it in parts, but make no claims as to the relative merits of what appears on the page and on the screen. (Fans will have their opinions, I am sure, especially those who consider the book a masterpiece, while this is just a big, decent TV movie.) That a 2008 Harris poll named it America’s fifth favorite book “of all time” makes my picking up this heavy tome no more likely, given that the top ten 10 also included two novels by Dan Brown, along with “Gone With the Wind” and “Atlas Shrugged.”