The Stand

Save yourself time and watch the original or read the book.

Too much flashing around, sideways, forwards, backwards.

Whoopi Goldberg and Alexander Skarsgård are terrible miscasts.

I personally loathe Whoopi Goldberg as an actress. She strikes me as a washed up hippie in every single role. Casting her here as Mother Abagail she lacks the necessary motherly qualities for the role and comes across as... a washed up hippie. She looks the role but it isn't her.

Alexander Skarsgård meanwhile... he just doesn't have the element for Flagg. He comes across as a boring guy that would be best cast as a ride along cop in a police movie. He's not in the right element here.

Most of the other characters are mostly OK, but not stand outs.

Now split this up into 1hr runtimes. It drags out an already long story longer. Without the elements of continuity due to the flashbacks and such it's less immersive.

Read the book watch the original. Don't waste the time here.

It's a nine part TV adaptation of the Stephen King novel of good versus evil. It's not any better than the 1994 version. More money may have been spent but it's not better. The structure is more disjointed which leaves the characters less compelling. I don't like Whoopi Goldberg in this role. The last episode feels stretched out which leaves it without tension. After the climax, the series needs to end. It's an unnecessary update of this material. If it needs doing, it needs some better imagination to bring new life to the story.

Hideous adaptation of Stephen King's sprawling novel stupidly breaks up the narrative into flashbacks and flash forwards, thus destroying any dramatic tension that might have existed. But I doubt there was any anyway under the lousy direction by a whole bunch of people. Was King involved in this mess?

Narrative aside, most of the cast is awful. Whoopi Goldberg and James Marsden are good. Everyone else stinks. I've never seen so much hammy overacting in one show. And all the blonde girls looks alike.

The timing of this mini-series is probably off. Showing a mini about the end of civilization in the midst of a pandemic might not have been the best idea. It leaves a sour taste.

The show runners here turned King's serious novel into a comic book.

I've read a few reviews from Stephen King groupies...and fair enough. The 1994 series had me mesmerized, though I had let it slip from memory. So this was exciting. Really if life came down to these characters, we are mince. It's so hard to identify with the 'righteous' at times, they seem oblivious to the world they're in. And the 'unclean' are really bland, the depravity is what you'd see going on if the world never went through this 'apocalypse' anyway. There is no awe at the Man himself, though he presents as the most watchable character...I don't know if there is enough going on to pique the interest to see it through.

Someone needs to edit this back into chronological order, it serves zero purpose to have it jump around all over the place. Whatever hack writer thought this was a good idea needs to slap himself back into sanity.

That's the only point worth making, everyone else has covered the show.