Stephen King didn’t call his novel The Virus. He didn’t call it The Disease or The End of the World As We Know It or anything that nihilistic. He wanted his 1978 book about a global pandemic that takes all but a fraction of human life with it to be called The Stand. When there are no rules, his thinking went, survivors have to make a choice: Do you go full Darwin and indulge dark, selfish instincts or do what’s right for the sake of others? “I wanted to write about bravery,” said King. “At some point, people do have to make a stand.”
The novel remains one of the author’s greatest achievements, and a new limited series adaptation is headed to CBS All Access later this year in the ominous shadow of an actual global pandemic. (The exact launch date is still to be determined.) Showrunners Benjamin Cavell and Taylor Elmore, who first worked together on Justified, are quick to point out that King layered in reassuring themes along with the terrifying ones. “It’s about the fundamental questions of what society owes the individual and what we owe to each other,” said Cavell. “Over the last however-many years, we have sort of taken for granted the structure of democracy. Now, so much of that is being ripped down to the studs. It’s interesting to see a story about people who are rebuilding it from the ground up.”
It’s hard to know what our world will feel like when The Stand begins its nine-episode run, but the coronavirus crisis has only intensified interest in movies like Contagion and Outbreak. The show had to wrap production four days early in March when COVID-19 began to shut down North America, but, as of now, CBS All Access plans to proceed with the release. “It was very surreal, obviously, to start to realize that there was a creeping pandemic the way there was at the beginning of our show,” Cavell said.
It’s important to note that the virus in The Stand is not an organic virus that leapt to humans from another species. “It’s a literally weaponized human-made device,” said Elmore, noting that an aspect of King’s story was the way humans too often engineer their own self destruction. And there will be no reference to the actual coronavirus. “This is an alternate version of how things could have gone.”
The disease in The Stand is also catastrophically worse than anything we’ve seen in real life, killing more than 99 percent of the population. King tried to quell some fear by tweeting this fact in the early days of the pandemic, but even he now acknowledges the unsettling similarities that have turned up in real life. “When you hear reports that 100,000 or 240,000 people are going to die, you’ve got to take notice, and it is going to be bad. It’s bad right now,” said King, who wrote a new ending to the story that serves as the mini-series’ final episode. “It’s brought the economy to a complete stop. In a lot of ways, I mean, you see the pictures of Times Square or London, and you say, ‘It really is like The Stand.’”
“But the cars aren’t piled up, and nobody’s shooting each other yet,” he added. Not long after that interview, men started showing up at anti-quarantine rallies with assault rifles. Then a security guard at a Family Dollar store was shot in the head, police said, after he asked a customer to wear a safety mask.
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May 20, 2020 at 06:02PM
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First Look at Stephen King’s The Stand - Vanity Fair
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