This contains massive spoilers...
People who've known me a while will know that I went through a healthy/unhealthy obsession with Stephen King between the late 1970s and the early 2000s. That obsession was accentuated regarding a couple of books; Insomnia - which I've read about six times - and The Stand - which, in one form or another, I've seen/read coming up to a dozen. I read the original paperback, twice. When I replaced it with a new hardback I read it again. Then I read it again when King released an unabridged version in the 1990s and read it again when I realised that one of my favourite books of all time was being made into a TV series.
That 1994 adaptation was... lacking in a lot of things, but it did have a surprisingly adequate cast - Gary Sinise as Stu Redman was really good, as was Ray Walston as Glenn Bateman; Miguel Ferrer added a serious side to Flagg's #2 Lloyd Henreid and an excellent Laura San Giacomo was a bit of a revelation as Nadine Cross. Not so good were Jamey Sheridan as Randal Flagg - he bought a certain shit-eating C&W hillbilly vibe that was really lacking in sinister or creepy; Molly Ringwald didn't work as Fran Goldsmith, Rob Lowe was wasted as Nick Andros and Matt (Max Headroom) Frewer was as menacing as the Trashcan Man as Sheridan was as Flagg. The thing about the 90s adaptation was it suffered from a lack of money to make the 'supernatural' scenes feel real. The cornfields and Mother Abigail was handled well, but as someone who pretty much knew whole chunks of dialogue from the book, I struggled to feel any huge affinity with the four-parter. I also don't think I've seen anything directed by Mick Garris that I've thought was worthy of him getting more work outside of flipping burgers. However, it was told in a linear fashion and you got to know the characters almost as well as you did in the book. You understood inside the first two 90-minute episodes, who was good, who was evil and why and what motivated them.
Since 1994, I've probably read The Stand three times more and also read some Marvel adaptation as well - unless I imagined that - so when I heard someone was doing a new 2021 TV adaptation my initial reaction was 'I hope they get the bits right the 94 version didn't do justice to' - literally, that was my biggest worry. I'm not going to say I was ecstatic about the new thing; there's always an element of trepidation whenever something wonderful in book form is adapted into another medium. The thing is without reading the book again and without watching a single episode of the new version, I started to have one of those hindsight moments of realisation - which might be obvious to some, but flew way over my head until recently...
The Stand is an apocalyptic horror novel that promotes misogyny, belittles the position of women in such a post-apocalyptic world and emphasises the importance of men in the future any post-apocalyptic world has. It's all about the weaknesses of women against the strength of men and even when the women are portrayed as strong or wilful it's to emphasise the importance of the men folk and their ultimate wisdom... It might as well be called The Misogyny.
In the novel there are three major female characters: Fran Goldsmith - young, pregnant, impressionable and largely redundant. Nadine Cross - weird, troubled, torn between good and evil, a bit 'dirty' without being too 'sexy' but obviously an evil bitch with no redeeming features, until it's too late and Mother Abigail - 108 years old and essentially just a cypher for God - there to tell the 'good' side that sacrifices have to be made, but all the women have to stay in Boulder and make sure the bairns and dinners are looked after. The Stand is all about men who stay strong, because if they don't they're either at or a risk and women who are always tempted by the apple offer nothing but peril to those around them; really, I'm not making this shit up.
The peripheral female characters are all either slightly hysterical (Larry's early post-apocalyptic partner) or conniving lesbian feminists (Dana Jurgens who gets the better of Flagg by preventing him from killing her with his own hands). In retrospect, the book (and the original TV adaptation) was all about women making soup and eventually changing nappies, while the men got on with the real work, except in Las Vegas where it was all about the women discovering they have double-jointed jaws and exposing as much flesh as they can to ensure they can show as much the next day without bits missing. In many ways, women come out of The Stand a little less than the only dog in it.
The more I think about the underlying misogyny and the depiction of women as either helpless or conniving, the more I question what I actually liked about the Stand, because it is the characters that drive it forward. Flagg - the antagonist - is in many ways just a totem for the devil and his counterpart, a weak and feeble old woman - Abigail Freemantle - aren't really what the book is about, they just supply a reason for all the characters to be in the same or different places at the same time.
Don't get me wrong; men don't exactly come out of this in a good light, but they do appear to be far more important and provide the underlying narrative. If you follow the journeys of the key protagonists, all of them are blighted by arseholes with penises. Stu has to contend with military men and then childish men (Harold Lauder); Franny spends her first half of the book stuck with Harold and the second half being Stu's cuddle monkey/beached whale. Larry is surrounded by domineering and weak women until he meets a stronger woman who is just as batshit crazy as the ones who he seems to have follow him around. Then you have peripheral, but important characters, such as Glenn and Ray, who are essentially drawn as so anodyne they don't really have anything to say outside of generalised cliché or patriarchal wisdom.
Oh and you have Nick Andros, who has only ever been the main character in the book and always been seen as much less in TV adaptations. Maybe that's because he's a deaf, dumb and almost blind boy (he lost an eye to an arsehole man) who might as well have been born with a vagina given the way his disabilities made him seem like he had one during his travels. Nick is by far and wide the best character in the book; that might be because he's essentially got to face most of the hurdles that all the non-male characters face. In many ways he's both the strongest and weakest character in the book. He also seems to clock what's going on considerably earlier than all the others, so in many ways his death comes as a complete shock, especially the first time you read the book, because literally up until the point where he's anatomically deconstructed, he's the main man and while you know what Harold and Nadine have planned, you kind of think it's going to be extras who will die and possibly one of the core characters who ultimately are there to make up the numbers. Oddly enough, in a book that is really only vaguely 'supernatural', Nick Andros really was the antithesis of anything 'supernatural' and dealt with everything in such a pragmatic way, so, in hindsight, he had to die.
The thing that makes The Stand such a compelling read, despite all of the dated and unsettling depictions of women, is that while it is extremely long, it never really gets bogged down; there are enough characters to ensure there's enough excitement until we get to the arse end of the story.
That brings us nicely to the new 2021 adaptation. When I first heard about this I was a bit excited as it was going to be a multi-part series - nine one hour episodes is three hours longer than the 1994 version, so I expected a lot of back-fill; a lot of character development and a lot of time spent on characters who were maybe neglected in 1994. It seems I could not have been further from the truth...
The Stand works best as a linear story; what flashbacks there were in the book were all short and pointed to events happening in the present, so imagine my surprise when the series opens with Harold and Teddy loading dump trucks up with dead bodies (cordwood) in Boulder, Colorado before flipping back and forth between pre-Captain Trips; during the plague and the immediate aftermath of it. It almost felt as though the director was accepting that everyone watching it will understand who was good and who was bad, except for most of the opening four episodes we see almost nothing of Flagg nor his team of shitbags charged with turning Las Vegas into Sodom. In fact, the most unsettling thing about the opening two or three episodes was how it was being released during a pandemic and felt a bit prophetic.
The book is essentially in four parts - the beginning, the middle, the end, and the epilogue, which weighs in at nearly a 6th of the entire book. The start of the plague (or book) is not drawn out too much; we got snap shots of the world crumbling but it wasn't really until it fell that we realise it had fallen. The middle is where we're introduced to other characters, get to properly know our main protagonists (Stu, Larry and Fran; Harold and Nick) and finally meet our good and evil totems. The end is really quite short; events take a weird twist after Harold attempts to take out the town with explosives and what in time is actually as much as five months is condensed in a very short space of time and then there's the epilogue which overlaps the end somewhat and then stretches into the distance. The epilogue of The Stand is arguably the most important thing about the book.
The 2021 adaptation throws out the linear narrative of the book (and the first TV series) and opts for jumping back and forth through times and this is where it fails almost from the word go. The entire point of the linear story King tells is to show how certain characters align themselves to specific sides, or have internal struggles with themselves that adds to the reader's understanding of what drives the main characters; by jumbling up the time frame you almost immediately get a sense that Harold Lauder is dangerous; something he didn't really become until months after the plague. He was always a pain in the arse, but that was down to his immaturity and the fact he was an asshole in training. The same could be said about Larry Underwood, the rock star come would-be saviour of decent people. Larry's driving motif is that he's 'not a nice guy' and he's done some shitty things all through his life culminating in a series of tragic events that define his character - the first time you read it you're never quite sure what side of the line Larry's going to fall. You need to live that with Larry (and with Harold) but you get neither in the 2021 version; it's hinted at, but you meet both of them as how they end up rather than watching their journey to either the good or the dark side.
The 1994 version cast Laura San Giacomo as Nadine Cross - it seemed like a daft bit of casting at the time, but she pulled it off extremely well and she was Nadine; everything about her acting was how you imagine Nadine in the book. The 2021 version pretty much screws the pooch straight away; by casting Amber Heard you were immediately alienating a largish percentage of your target audience and Johnny Depp fans. Heard is a divisive actress and Depp fans hate her so much they managed to get The Stand rated less than a horrendous 4.0 on IMDB even before it came out. Heard is also far too attractive, sexy and utterly unbelievable as Nadine. Giacomo was also a very hot young thing when she played her, but you wouldn't have thought so. You could believe that San Giacomo's Ms Cross was a virgin, that she'd lived a really sheltered life and that she was saving herself for some odd figure from her dreams, the one who would return for her after the plague. Heard is actually just a mannequin and a quite wooden one at that. You do not believe she's saved herself for Flagg and where in the book and original TV version she was often seen as 'not 100% Team Freemantle' by many of the rest of the cast, in 2021 her strangeness isn't even looked at; in fact when events eventually play out the way they do with Harold, you almost get the idea that the survivors of Harold's ill-fated assassination attempt were slightly surprised that Nadine was part of it.
Another annoying thing about the 2021 version is it actually did look at some of the bits that were omitted from 1994, the problem was it also didn't include many of the key issues throughout the start and middle that defined the characters and actually made you care about them. By the time Nick is blown to pieces in the book, you are heavily invested in all the good guys, which is why his death is a real gut punch. You didn't see that coming; not Nick, he was the leader even if he couldn't speak or hear or even see properly. You didn't see it coming, which made the next 200 pages all the more intense. In fact, the first two times I read the book, I breezed through the next 200 pages so much that at times, on read #3, I was not remembering loads of it. I was focused on whether Stu was going to live, I wasn't bothered about Glenn, Ray and Larry walking into the valley of the shadow of death; their gooses were long cooked, it was whether Stu would survive to get back to Fran and her baby he was not the father of and whether that baby would survive Captain Trips.
In fact, by the time Nick's original co-traveller Tom Cullen - spelled M-O-O-N - finds Stu, you really don't give a shit about the other three or whatever happens to Las Vegas and Randall Flagg. Of the two best, most rounded characters in the book, one was dead and the other was dying; the rest was just bullshit. And oddly enough that was why The Stand worked so well, despite its misogynistic overtones. You knew how it would end but you were now so invested in the remaining characters it was more important to find out if they survive everything.
The '94 version featured former Max Headroom actor Matt Frewer as the very important character called The Trashcan Man. Frewer was crap in it, but really outside of Headroom, Frewer is crap in most things, but Trashie was there from the beginning; you got his full uninterrupted story and a total psychological profile of him. It was clear from the very beginning how valuable Trashcan Man would be for Flagg, but it was also quite clear the profoundly opposite effect he had on everyone else; he was also very much an Agent of Chaos and one neither good nor evil had much control over. The 2021 version has a much better Trashcan Man; utterly bonkers, totally fucked up and yet they didn't see fit to introduce possibly the fourth most important character in the book until we were in the home straight of the new version; episode 6 to be precise.
By episode 8 - the one I'm currently at and penultimate episode - it is clear that the 2021 version is outrageously of considerably poorer quality than the original. Despite more time, arguably better casting and an acknowledgement that women were an inferior species in the book and the first adaptation; it still manages to feel like an utterly soulless and unnecessary remake.
In 2021's version Las Vegas is hedonism in extreme; it looks like anarchy but there is obviously some form of hierarchy stopping at Lloyd - who is now just a complete cock - and then Flagg. Lloyd Heinreid was played by Miguel Ferrer in the original; he was actually quite a clever crook who simply got in with the wrong guy - he knew this but he was high on loads of drugs so he didn't care. A man who could well have run his own crime syndicate if he'd been born somewhere other than Hicksville meant that Ferrer was a great choice. I can't be arsed to look at IMDB to see who plays him now, but dear God he's about as scary and conveys as much gravitas as a fucking wombat in a clown suit.
I expect the final episode will be Tom and Stu battling their way back to Boulder through the winter to be reunited with the Free Zone and resume life as not one of the leaders, but one of the people. The entire series is watchable like a car crash, but it's so facile and shallow you really couldn't give a shit about the characters and some of the liberties King's own son, Owen, has taken in adapting the original are almost sacrilegious. So much more time, so little effort. As lockdown filler it's on a par with cutting your genitals off with a spork.
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