A second bite at a very large apple
Stephen King's The Stand is one of those novels that seems almost impossible to adapt faithfully — not because the story is obscure, but because it is enormous in every sense. It runs well over a thousand pages in its uncut form, spans the full arc of civilisation's collapse and attempted renewal, and asks its audience to invest in a sprawling ensemble of characters while also taking seriously a cosmic battle between good and evil. The 1994 ABC miniseries had a go and emerged as a nostalgic curiosity more than a triumph — beloved by a certain generation but creaky in the way that prestige television of that era almost always is. When CBS All Access announced a new version for 2020, the obvious question was whether the medium had finally caught up to the material. The honest answer, having watched all nine episodes, is: sometimes.
What you're getting into
For the uninitiated — and this is as spoiler-light as the premise allows — The Stand begins with a catastrophic pandemic. A weaponised strain of influenza escapes a military facility and moves through the American population with terrifying efficiency, killing the vast majority of humanity within weeks. The survivors, scattered and traumatised, begin gravitating toward two poles: a community of hopeful rebuilders coalescing around a 108-year-old woman in Boulder, Colorado, and a darker enclave forming in Las Vegas around a charismatic, supernatural figure who goes by Randall Flagg. What follows is less a conventional thriller than an extended meditation on how human societies reconstitute themselves after catastrophe — and what choices individuals make when the old rules have dissolved entirely.
This version, developed by showrunner Benjamin Cavell, makes the bold structural choice of scrambling the chronology. Rather than following the catastrophe sequentially, episodes fracture the timeline, intercutting the immediate chaos of the plague with the post-collapse community-building and the characters' backstories. The intent is clearly to create a richer psychological portrait of the ensemble before the plot demands their allegiance to one side or the other. Whether it works depends rather heavily on which character you happen to be watching.
Craft: the good, the uneven, the baffling
The production design is, without question, the adaptation's most consistent achievement. The empty highways, overgrown parking lots, and ash-strewn streets of a depopulated America are rendered with genuine care. There is a visual grammar here — wide, desolate, occasionally beautiful — that honours the eerie quietude King's prose sustains across hundreds of pages. Director Josh Boone, who helmed several episodes, shows a good eye for scale and emptiness, and when the camera holds on a deserted landscape the show earns something like genuine dread.
The cast is a more complicated story. Whoopi Goldberg brings a grounded, almost earthy warmth to Mother Abagail that the 1994 version never quite achieved, though the writing occasionally leaves her stranded in mysticism without sufficient dramatic texture. James Marsden works hard as Stu Redman, the Texan everyman at the centre of everything, and he's likeable without being particularly electric — which, in fairness, is rather true to the character. Alexander Skarsgård, cast as Randall Flagg, is a more divisive choice. He is undeniably striking, but the interpretation leans heavily on an eerie, almost campy charm that risks deflating the character's genuine menace. Flagg should be terrifying in the way that real charismatic authoritarians are terrifying — seductive and plausible. Skarsgård finds the seduction more easily than the plausibility.
The ensemble supporting cast yields genuine highlights. Owen Teague as Harold Lauder — a character whose arc demands that we understand both his grievances and his ugliness — is quietly excellent and arguably the most complete performance in the series. Odessa A'zion brings energy and credibility to Frannie Goldsmith in a role that requires navigating grief, survival instinct, and nascent leadership simultaneously.
What works, and what doesn't
The series is at its strongest during the immediate aftermath of the plague: the surreal, horrifying quietness of a world that has simply stopped. These passages carry real emotional weight and suggest what the adaptation could have been if it had trusted its atmospheric instincts more consistently.
The chronological fragmentation, however, ultimately works against the show more than it helps. King's novel builds dread through accumulation — the slow, terrible spread of the plague, the bewilderment of survival, the gradual coalescence of communities. By cutting between timelines, the miniseries dissipates that accumulation. We arrive at emotional payoffs before we've fully earned them; certain character decisions land with less force because we haven't spent enough consecutive time in their inner lives. The final episode, which King himself wrote, becomes the subject of this structural debt in ways that are hard to discuss without spoilers, but suffice to say that the ending divides audiences sharply — and not always for reasons that serve the story.
There are also tonal inconsistencies that pull the viewer out of immersion. The show wants, at various moments, to be a grounded pandemic drama, a character study, a supernatural horror piece, and an almost mythological fable. These registers can coexist — King manages all of them in the novel — but the television version hasn't fully solved the problem of how to transition between them without jarring gear-shifts.
Who should watch it
If you've read and love the novel, this adaptation will give you genuine pleasures — certain scenes are realised beautifully, and some of the casting choices are spot-on — while also frustrating you in predictable ways. If you're new to the story, this is a reasonable entry point, though you may find yourself curious enough about the characters to seek out the source material. For viewers who enjoy post-apocalyptic drama with genuine scope and ambition, it's worth nine episodes of your time, with appropriate expectations managed accordingly.
