The Stand, Episode 4: CBS Hates Stephen King

Great, more scenes all chopped up.  It’s like someone ran the script through a blender.  

We start at a community meeting in the Free Zone.  

. . . But then bounce backward (we assume backward) to a committee meeting,  Don't get confused by community and committee, they are two different scenes. 

. . . only to be yo-yo’d back to the community meeting.  For me, this is the first scene where Larry is really likeable; even inspiring.  

. . . Wait, don’t get excited, because about the time this meeting gets interesting, we are sent back to the committee meeting.

. . . and you guessed it: We are back at the community meeting.  Wait, which is the flashback and which is reality?  It’s like a chicken egg question.  Which scene came first?

And all that the INTRO !

The skipping and dipping doesn’t stop there.  The entire show is a time-warp.  Back to the Future had less time travel.  

There is no “now” in the Stand.  What that means is that there’s no real story progression.  Here’s an example: There is a very good scene where Fran and Herold are attacked.  It wasn’t in the book, so it pulls everyone forward in their seat a little – what’s happening?  This is new.  Only, even as they put in what should look like an impossible situation, there’s no tension because we’ve already established it’s a flashback and our two main characters in the scene make it out just fine. How do we know?  Because some idiot told us the end of the story before telling us the story!

There are other strange things here.  One reason for doing the Stand on cable was to actually – do The Stand.  That is, TV couldn’t handle some of the Stephen King content.  However, twice now CBS has flinched.  First by not giving us the Lincoln Tunnel done “right.”  Actually, Mick Garris did great with that scene.  But I still would have liked to see it without television standard imposed.  But the oddities continue.  We all remember exactly what Nadine told Herold he could do to her; only, CBS is afraid to air that, so we just get strange hints.  

The need to change every single character is frustrating as well.  Sweet Tom is reduced to a joke; a bumbling idiot instead of the kindhearted good intentioned character he is in the novel.  The Judge can’t possibly be an old man; so for no reason at all, he becomes and old woman.  Why?  Just because CBS can.  Glenn is supposed to the old man of the story, but instead he’s just another middle aged white guy.  There’s no story reason for any of these changes.  At some point, it’s no longer Stephen King’s story that’s being told; it’s different people all together living in the universe of The Stand.  You almost expect this Tom to run into the Tom from the King novel, because they are two wholly different people.  So same plot, but with new characters.

It’s like that Star Trek (old series) where each person on the enterprise has a duplicate in another universe that’s like them, but just a little different.  With each character you go, “Yeah, that’s them... but something’s wrong.  Something’s off.”  It’s like drinking Coke without the right syrup mix.

If CBS wanted to give viewers a gift, they’d send the Stand back in for another edit.  A redo.  Because actually, I like the scenes a lot.  The characters are insanely good. At almost every turn, they made decisions with the cast that were brilliant.  But it’s all lost in the edit blender.

What someone should do is build a visual timeline we can track all this on, because at some point I'm just going to give up.  CBS teased, and then they kicked fans in the face with garbage.