In advance of its December debut, CBS All Access has put out the first short teaser for its upcoming horror miniseries Stephen King’s The Stand. Anchored by a glimpse of Whoopi Goldberg as Mother Abigail Freemantle, and ending with the appearance of Alexander Skarsgård’s Randall Flagg, the trailer is only 30 seconds long. Also, Whoopi gets into a staring contest with a wolf, for reasons.
The trailer provides several brief glances of the series’s ensemble cast in the trailer, including Odessa Young as Frannie Goldsmith, Jovan Adepo as Larry Underwood, Heather Graham as Rita Blakemoor, James Marsden as Stu Redman, and Greg Kinnear, mostly hidden behind a cloud of smoke, as Glen Bateman. (That’s right. Greg Kinnear is playing the cantankerous old man, because he’s nearly sixty now. Have fun with the sheer density of information that’s packed into that casting choice.)
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The Stand is an apparently faithful adaptation of Stephen King’s novel, which was originally published with severe edits in 1978. It was inspired in part by the 1968 Dugway incident, when a U.S. Army weapons test accidentally killed six thousand sheep in Utah with a nerve gas leak. As King writes in his 1980 non-fiction book Danse Macabre, what haunted him was that if the wind had been blowing another way, the same nerve gas might have hit Salt Lake City.
In The Stand, King’s fourth published novel, a weaponized superflu escapes from a Department of Defense laboratory. Nicknamed “Captain Trips,” the flu is highly contagious and 99.4% lethal. It kills off most of humanity in the course of two weeks, and causes the fall of civilization a bit faster than that. The handful of survivors across North America eventually congregate in one of two cities, Boulder and Las Vegas, and end up on opposite sides of a subtly supernatural fight between good and evil.
Directed by Josh Boone (The New Mutants), this is the second TV adaptation of The Stand, following a miniseries that ran on ABC primetime in May of 1994. 2020’s The Stand has been in the works for years, and moved from film to TV in 2018. It’s slated to run for 9 episodes, with one airing every week exclusively on All Access. This clocks it in at 3 hours longer overall than the 1994 adaptation. It also includes a new finale for the story, written by Stephen King himself, which King has reportedly had in the works for the last 30 years.
One notable difference between the adaptations is the reintroduction of Rita Blakemoor. In the novel, she accompanies Larry Underwood on his escape from a post-plague New York City; in the 1994 miniseries, her character is roughly amalgamated with that of Nadine Cross, who was played by Laura San Giacomo there, and by Amber Heard in the 2020 remake.
In addition to Goldberg, Skarsgård, Young, Marsden, Adepo, Graham, Kinnear, and Heard, The Stand features Brad William Henke as Tom Cullen, Owen Teague as Harold Lauder, Nat Wolff as Lloyd Henreid, Katherine McNamara as Julie Lawry, Marilyn Manson as Donald “Trashcan Man” Elbert, and Henry Zaga as Nick Andros.
Stephen King’s The Stand is scheduled to debut on December 17th as a CBS All Access exclusive.
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Source: Cinema Blend