“I never regarded The Stand as being a book about a pandemic,” said screenwriter Benjamin Cavell about his timely TV series. “The reason we chose our nonlinear approach to the storytelling – the big driver – was that we didn’t want to make the audience sit through three episodes of the world dying before we got to the beat of our story, which is what comes afterwards.”
Describing the meat of the story as the “elemental story of good and evil,” the Stephen King adaptation is a character-driven TV show about people in a world in ruins. In this aftermath of biblical proportions, people are splitting up into two groups. “You see the seeds of the coming conflict. Then, we flash back to see how the pandemic transformed these people.”
Some viewers believe the pandemic-based drama is opportunistic, but since Cavell came on board in 2018, he certainly doesn’t see it that way. Cavell, who co-created the series with Josh Boone (The New Mutants) is also known for his work on Justified, Homeland, Sneaky Pete, and SEAL Team.
“I think we were just starting to understand how devastating COVID was going to be, but I don’t think anybody had wrapped their heads around what it was going to become. Ultimately, we were adapting a 40-year-old iconic masterpiece.”
Despite the parallels, “our conceit was that this virus was man made in a military lab and ninety-nine percent fatal. It had, perhaps, a supernatural element to it as to who it does and doesn’t kill. We filmed and wrote those scenes before anyone had heard of COVID.”
Benjamin Cavell
Adapting the Adaptation
Stephen King published The Stand in 1978. In 1994, a 4-episode mini-series starring Gary Sinise and Molly Ringwald premiered on television. For the 2020 version, Cavell said the non-linear narrative was the main departure from the original narratives, but they also had to make something that felt current.
“Part of the way to do that was to make our central cast look more like the America of 2021,” said the screenwriter. The cast, including James Marsden, Alexander Skarsgård, Whoopi Goldberg, Greg Kinnear, and Amber Heard, was meant to elevate the material by diversifying the cast.
“In King’s book, four white guys walk to Vegas to confront the dark man. We diversified the cast in a way that doesn’t feel forced, but organic. It was important for us to keep the core of these iconic characters, while changing them to fit the times.”
Beyond the casting, the same was true for the characters. Mother Abagail Freemantle, for example, is played by Whoopi Goldberg. “The discussions I had [with Whoopi] were that she was never going to play the ‘magical negro’ [trope]. She would always remind me that our touchstone was that Mother Abagail was a real person, even if she’s in touch with something supernatural.”
Another update, the character of Tom Cullen (Brad William Henke) was originally somewhat of a Lenny from Of Mice and Men character. For this story, the child-in-adult-body character was more of a character who lacked a sense of self. “Tom is a forty-two-year-old man who is developmentally disabled, but he’s not in the dark. He understands that he has challenges.”
Frannie Goldsmith (Odessa Young), Mother Abagail Freemantle (Whoopi Goldberg) & James Marsden (Stu Redman)
In the book, the character is hypnotized by an exterior force, but the writers in the current TV series wanted to give this character more of a heroic moment in the show. “We wanted to give him the dignity of being a real human being.”
Consulting with Stephen King
Author Stephen King was involved with the adaptation and his son, Owen, was a producer and staff writer on the project. “Stephen King was reading every draft and approving every director. He was very much a part of it, and wrote our coda episode. It wasn’t clear he was going to do that, but after he read our first couple of drafts, we knew he had some continuation of the story he had been turning over in his head for a decade. He was very generous about it.”
Cavell said it was a “bit daunting” to work with King, one of the world’s most beloved authors in the world, but since King had been “brewing over the story for 30 years,” the team was delighted to have him work directly on “The Circles Closes” episode. “Every member of our cast felt a huge responsibility to bring their A-game.”
King never rejected any of our changes to the adaptation. “He never said, ’No, don’t do that.’ At some point, once he had seen what we were doing, he emailed me and said, ‘Go on with your bad self,’” joked Cavell. King trusted the creators’ vision for the show and let them run with it.
“I think he’s been through it all so many times and he’s very upfront about adaptations of his work he does like and adaptations of his work he doesn’t like. He has enough confidence in his own vision and knows work adapted for the screen is going to change, especially since a novel is so internalized.”
Since novel characters do not need to drive the action in the way they do for a TV series or movie, there are countless entertainment-based reasons changes need to happen between a book and a series.
Writing for an Ensemble Cast
There are partial spoilers ahead…
Since there are eighteen characters across at least four episodes each (plus all of the other characters), writing for the series and trying to create equal screen time is nearly impossible. “I wish there was a succinct answer as to how we went about that, but it was really an evolution,” said Cavell about writing for so many characters. “It was constant. We were very aware that we had all these people to introduce, to service, and do right by — right through to the end.”
In the climactic final episodes, specifically the hand-of-God sequence, where “the wicked are consumed by fire,” the villains don’t really get their own individual deaths in the book. “We wanted to complete an arc for every character. That was another departure we found from Stephen King’s book.”
Stephen King
“When we first meet Lloyd Henreid (Nat Wolf) in the book, he’s killing people and seems to be fine with it. He laughing about it, but there’s a scene in the book, where he’s hesitant to kill Glenn. That didn’t make sense to us, so we found an arc for Lloyd and made a meal out of it.”
Thinking about each individual character arc they took a great deal of time in the writers’ room. “I can’t say how many times we asked, are we losing track of this character, or are we introducing this character too late, where we’re not even meeting all of our essential people until the end of episode three?” Any other route, however, is perhaps too confusing to the audience.
Interweaving Themes
“One of the pleasures of doing this adaptation in 2020, beyond the fact that there is this new medium of high-end limited series, is that the themes or the questions King is exploring feel even more relevant today, at least to me.”
Questions of “what is the basis of human society?” or “what does society owe to individuals?” or “what do individuals owe to society?” are perhaps more relevant today than ever before. “How would you rebuild if you were given a chance to press the reset button? Would you rebuild the same way? Would it lead to the same problems?”
These timely themes have always been important, of course, but perhaps they’re more globally discussed today. “Americans of my generation grew up taking these things for granted,” said Cavell, who was a toddler when the book came out. “The structure of democracy or our institutions. That’s the time for The Stand. It’s about questioning all of those things and rebuilding them all from scratch.”
Beyond social dynamics, there are also countless religious themes in the story. “It was important for me that one could enjoy the story without knowing Christian mythology, but if the viewer believes Mother Abagail’s contact is with something other than God, then you can do so.”
In terms of the title, Cavell said there are multiple metaphorical meanings of The Stand, but the “literal reference is that the wheel keeps turning, but – like the King universe – you can never vanquish evil completely. It’s a wheel, and it always keeps turning. You have vanquished evil for now, but it’s going to return at some point, and you must be prepared to stand against it.”
In terms of his own work, Cavell makes a similar point, “In my own work, I need to be rushless enough to only put out things I can stand behind and have the restraint to murder my darlings and not put out things less than my ability.”
