The Stand, based on the 1978 Stephen King novel of the same name, chronicles the survivors of a pandemic dividing into two camps: those who follow Randall Flagg and those who follow Mother Abigail. While much of the book is taken up with the journeys the survivors take to assemble either in Las Vegas, Nevada or Boulder, Colorado (depending on the alignment of their souls), The Stand had more than enough treachery, tragedy, and romance crammed into a relatively straightforward tale of good versus evil to make for compelling viewing.
A remake of The Stand will be coming to CBS All Access in mid-December, and it has the potential to improve on the original in a number of ways. Stephen King has even written a brand-new ending for it. Once the remake airs, the 1994 version of The Stand will be probably be shelved and largely forgotten.
But, man, its first seven minutes are still pretty much perfect.
First, some context. The internet existed in 1994, but was just a baby in terms of its development. With DVR technology still years off, television audiences were at the mercy of network programming and commercial breaks. Households that missed important shows would have to hope for a rerun, because there was no such thing as looking it up on YouTube or streaming it from a service. Sure, cable had been around for years, but network TV programming didn’t migrate there the way it does now. All of which is to say, if there was something big on TV, everyone re-arranged their schedules to watch it. Nobody wanted to be the one person who missed it last night.
The Stand was the definition of “something big on TV.” The production was a massive undertaking that had 125 speaking roles and included some genuine movie stars, including Rob Lowe (cheekily cast as a deaf mute), Molly Ringwald, and Gary Sinise, about to become a household name thanks to Forrest Gump, which hit theaters a few months after The Stand aired on ABC. That doesn’t sound all that impressive to a modern ear, but at the time, movie stars slumming it on TV was a rarity.
So, yeah, The Stand was a big damn deal, but being on network TV meant it had to make some compromises. Broadcast television is still where “safe” programming lives, and that was even more true in 1994. The TV adaptation sanded off most of The Stand‘s rougher edges, leaving it oftentimes feeling toothless. Some really grim stuff happens in the novel of The Stand, and that’s ignoring all the corpses left behind by the plague. The TV version gets all the major plot points right, but pulls its punches just enough to not upset ABC’s sponsors too much.
Which makes the first seven minutes all the more remarkable. They fit within the confines of propriety that network TV demands and yet deliver a vision of death and dread that grabs viewers by the ears and forces them to look. The setup is easy to understand from the start: there’s a US Government facility in the middle of nowhere, staffed by perfectly ordinary people with perfectly ordinary families. People go about their business, doing laundry, bringing home groceries, riding bikes. And then, an alarm and two words: “Containment breach.”
It doesn’t really matter what’s broken containment. The details don’t matter. It’s bad enough to send the gate guard running to collect his wife and baby and flee. He guns the engine of his car, speeding to make it out before the gate closes and they’re all trapped. And after he succeeds, Blue Oyster Cult’s “Don’t Fear the Reaper” plays out nearly in its entirety as the camera pans over what he was running from. Everyone in the facility is dead. They dropped where they stood, in the middle of making lunch, playing ping pong, working at their desks, or clawing to get out. The audience doesn’t need the whole montage to get the point – “Don’t Fear the Reaper” isn’t exactly subtle – but it just keeps going and going and going, until it finally exits the facility and comes back to the guard’s car, now far away from the base and headed towards town. And in an instant, the audience flips from being relieved the guard escaped with his family, to realizing that he’s the one riding the pale horse. Death is coming and there will be no stopping it.
The remake of The Stand will almost certainly feel more relevant if only because it’s airing in the middle of a genuine pandemic that has already killed hundreds of thousands. Almost everything about the way programming is created now works to the benefit of the remake, from the actors willing to participate to the visual effects available to make Randall Flagg the terrifying embodiment of evil that came across in the pages of the novel. (No disrespect to Jamey Sheridan, who did a great job in the original, but his transformation into a demon was a little lacking even at the time.) But despite all those advantages, this new version of The Stand still has a very high bar to clear if it hopes to beat those first seven minutes of the original.
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