I watched "The Stand" so you don't have to
Stephen King’s The Stand was made into a passable four-part miniseries in 1994, and then redone last year as a nine-part travesty. Recently available on Amazon Prime, I quit 15 minutes into the second episode.
Later I’ll discuss a bit about King’s influence on my writing, but let’s get this celluloid shit out of the way first.
I had some mindless task to do: prepping the new book for mailout. So I figured I could return to the show and sort of half watch it while I wrote down addresses and stuffed envelopes. After four episodes I was ready to switch over to watching Archer for the third time, but something made me want to see how deep the suckage went.
And it’s hard to describe why it sucks so bad, but I’ll try.
Biggest issue is the time hops. Early on they jump way forward to about two-thirds of the way into the book. Time hops are meant to BACKFILL. When something takes place in a present time, you can effectively show shit back in time to give some explanation as to why something is happening now. All these time hops were FORWARD and totally spoiled the shit out of stuff. And it was so frequent it could cause some people vertigo. Whoever made that editing decision deserves a case of Captain Trips.
The casting is pretty shitty. I didn’t like Molly Ringwald as Frannie in the 1994 version, but I was never a fan of any of her work. The rest of the cast for the 90s version was mostly solid, although Randall Flagg was pretty meh. Matt Frewer was awesome as Trashcan Man and Miguel Ferrer did a decent job as Lloyd Henreid. Gary Sinise was excellent as Stu Redman. Laura San Giacomo did a good job as Nadine Cross as well.
But this 2020 cast just didn’t work. Especially Alexander Skarsgård as the Dark Man. Let me tell you I have a serious man crush on Skarsgård, especially after watching the new The Little Drummer Girl miniseries. The way he smoldered in that show . . . And I’m not sure why he absolutely sucked as the Walking Dude, but he could teach things that suck how to suck in that portrayal. Blarf.
This is the part I don’t understand. The 1994 miniseries was four episodes, and this nine-episode 2020 version managed to tell less of the story than the 1994 version did. I don’t know how they did it, but SO MUCH important stuff was left out and replaced with . . . I’m not sure . . . utterly forgettable garbage.
The back stories to the characters are critical for making us care about them, and coupled with the time hops it was so disjointed and so many important things were left out that we just did NOT care about them. Not anyone. Fuck them all. Let them all get sick or nuked or whatever. Fuck you guys and fuck this show.
The actor who played Lloyd Henreid was terribly miscast, and the whole “Pokerized him ol’ buddy” scene was fucking painful to watch,” whereas in the book that scene was amazing.
There was only one scene in this televised atrocity that I thought was sort of cool, and that was the first glimpse of the decadence of the Las Vegas side, with a drunken and drugged orgy in a casino. It made me think I might have gone to Vegas rather than Boulder. It looked kind of fun.
Final gripes: They did Trashcan Man dirty, so we didn’t even know what the fuck was going on with him, and Nick Andros was turned into non-event. One thing that really pissed me off was how they completely skipped over Tom Cullen rescuing Stu. That was a critical dénouement that brought it all to a happy ending. I loved that part of the book, and it was in the 1994 TV version, but they just skipped past it all. Instead, they gave us a final bullshit episode of Frannie’s dumbfuck adventures down the well and don’t ask it never happened in the book and I hated this and really just don’t watch it.
Okay let’s talk about the book. Stephen King taught me how to swear.
Well, my father was a carpenter, so I had a good grounding in profanity, but when it came to writing, King was a major influence on me. His were the first books I read that contained profanity, jumping from Roald Dahl’s giant peaches to pestilence apocalypse, and 13-year-old James fucking loved it.
I read The Stand in 1981, three years after it was first published. And I know the story has issues, such as the “magical negro” trope. But James at 13 didn’t know any of that, and neither did many other people in 1981. I just really loved the book. This was the “short” version that was 800 and some pages.
I mentioned the scene with Lloyd and Poke. In the book, Poke gets blown away and one character tells the cops, “He’s deader ‘n a shitbug.” And I laughed and laughed because the way it was described just struck me as hilarious. If you haven’t read it, don’t feel bad for Poke. He had it coming. He’d just murdered and old woman and laughed about it, saying, “She’ll never watch Lawrence Welkagain!”
You may have noticed that I will sometimes refer to something “driving me totally bugshit.” That’s from The Stand. Lloyd is in prison and almost everyone is dead from the plague and some guy keeps yelling “Mother!” and Lloyd describes the yelling as driving him bugshit. I use “bugshit” instead of “batshit” because everyoneuses batshit and I’ve had people comment that they think bugshit is hilarious and I say yeah me too I stole it from Stephen King four decades ago.
In 1995 I was in Guatemala learning Spanish for writing my master’s thesis, which you access here if you wish. The title is Rebellion and the Quest for Social Revolution in Latin America: The Case of Guatemala in the 1960s. That’s why I chose Guatemala for my immersion trip. I spent four hours a day, five days a week, working one on one with a tutor named Guillermo who had a master’s degree and it cost me $10 US a week for his services. Guillermo knew I was writing about the history of his homeland and didn’t want me to fuck it up, so he punished me and made me learn my Spanish. I’d come into the country having a decent knowledge of the language; I left Guatemala not fluent, but quite proficient.
Anyway, in addition to the four hours of instruction each day he piled on the homework. I was immersed in study seven hours a day plus a lot of conversations each evening with the family I was staying with. Oscar, the patriarch, didn’t speak a word of English and loved to chat with me at the dinner table, so I did my best to keep up.
After two weeks my brain felt like I was in Spanish overload and this little coffee shop I would study at had a used bookstore and I found a battered copy of the extenda-dance-mix version of The Stand. The science fiction book I’d been reading wasn’t holding my attention, so I snapped it up.
The “uncut” version was over 1,100 pages, and it gave me a link back home I desperately needed. There was no internet yet. I was newly married and paid a small fortune to call my wife twice a week for about 15 minutes each time from a payphone. My evening readings of the Mega-Stand became a soothing escape from the homesickness.
I read the extended version again about five years ago and . . . editors exist for a reason.
Now I’m thinking I need to purge the 2020 TV show from my brain with a reread of the 800-page version. I think I’ll do that.