The Stand – What You Need To Know

Jason and Cristina discuss what we know about the new CBS series The Stand! We give an overview of the show. Discuss the latest trailer release. Go over the new cast announcements and compare them to the 1994 series, and talk about what we hope to get from the 2020 version of the show.

Free CKC wallpaper downloads! https://www.coffeeklatchcrew.com/ckc-wallpapers/

Check out our Patreon page where we give you bonus content and monthly movie reviews! https://www.patreon.com/ckcpodcast

Email us at contact@coffeeklatchcrew.com

Twitter!: https://twitter.com/ckcpodcast  #ckcpodcast 
Facebook:  https://www.facebook.com/ckcpodcast
Subscribe to us via iTunes!

CBS The Stand, The Stand, Stephen King

Podcast Notes –

ABOUT:

CBS All Access – beginning December 17 (10 episodes)

The Stand is Stephen King’s apocalyptic vision of a world decimated by plague and embroiled in an elemental struggle between good and evil. The fate of mankind rests on the frail shoulders of the 108-year-old Mother Abigail and a handful of survivors. Their worst nightmares are embodied in a man with a lethal smile and unspeakable powers: Randall Flagg, the Dark Man.

“The Stand,” based on King’s 1978 novel, comes from Benjamin Cavell, who serves as showrunner.  Josh Boone is executive producer and director (of premiere & finale).

• Cavell – producer for Homeland & Justified
• Boone – director for The Fault in our Stars

Other producers include: Taylor Elmore, Will Weiske, Jimmy Miller, Roy Lee and Richard P. Rubinstein, Jake Braver, Jill Killington, Owen King, Knate Lee and Stephen Welke.  The Stand will close with a new coda written by the famed author himself.

CKC STRUCTURE:

What to expect from our review episodes

• Critics/Overall Thoughts
• Title, Music
• New Faces & Places
• Crow’s Eye View (plot)
• Questions
• Dream Rating/ MVS (hosts & poll)
• Klatcher’s Comments
• Closer Look/ Spoilers

TRAILER REVIEW:

The book begins with the escape of a biological weapon — a virulent form of plague — from a government lab and its destructive path across the United States and the world. With most of humanity wiped out, two distinct sides form in what’s left of the US: a group of righteous, basically decent folks who gather in Boulder, Colorado around a mystical old woman named Mother Abagail and a collection of criminals, malcontents, and the weak-hearted in Las Vegas, gathered around an evil entity in human form known as Randall Flagg.

“The world is now a blank page, make your stand,” Mother Abagail says.  Some roads are empty, while others are littered with abandoned cars, and one very important one leads to the Boulder Free Zone, where those who Mother Abagail called to came running to rebuild society. “All I know is we dreamed of her and she was real,” Stu Redman says,  “There’s bitter days ahead — death and terror.

The trailer gives us our first extended look at a number of scenes and images that appear to be directly lifted from the novel, including the streets of New York City clogged with abandoned cars, hero Stu Redman (James Marsden) making his escape from a lab where he’s kept while the last remaining scientists try to discover why he’s immune to the virus, the initial meeting between Stu and world-weary pop star Larry Underwood (Jovan Adepo), and the first gathering of the Boulder community.

The miniseries will shuffle the chronology of King’s book, meaning it won’t play out the same linear way as the 1994 ABC miniseries. The first episode begins with survivors in masks and protective gear clearing dead bodies from a neighborhood in Boulder, Colorado. As we meet the major players in the story, we flash back to their lives pre-pandemic, hopscotching between life before and after. “King does this great thing that we made the conscious decision not to do, which is to go to the 10,000-foot view of what’s going on,” Cavell said. “That’s not a luxury that our people have.

What does the apocalypse look like from the ground where you can’t see what’s happening other places, you can’t see what’s happening to other people, you can only see your subjective experience?”  “I didn’t want to make the audience sit through 3 episodes of the world dying before we got to the meat of our story…The Stand has never been about a pandemic, but about the battle that follows between good and evil for the soul of what remains of our humanity.”

As we meet the major characters in the ruined world, we’ll see flashbacks to their old lives at the time the pandemic hit.

One thing also highlighted by the footage, however, seems to be that Randall is going to be spending a good amount of time taking the shape of animals. In the 1994 miniseries, the villain was most often represented as a raven, but it would appear that this time around he is going to be appearing in wolf form a lot.

CAST COMPARISON:

Stu Redman (played by James Marsden) a Texas good old boy who was there at the very start of the outbreak. “When we find him, he’s in a locked room in which there are people interacting with him with these hazmat suits on, and they’re not telling him what’s going on,” Cavell says. The series then flashes back to him hanging out at the local gas station when an out-of-control car slammed into the pumps. Inside the car was Patient Zero, a worker at an American bio weapon lab who escaped just as it was being locked down. With him escaped the virus that would end the world.

One of the central figures in this vast cast of characters is Frannie Goldsmith (Odessa Young), who learns she is pregnant just as the disease takes hold. She is immune to the virus, but will her child be too? “We do focus very much on that story of Fran and the baby,” says Elmore. “What are a modern woman’s motivations in this position, a 20-year-old kid who is pregnant when the world ends? She’s a formidable force in this story.”

She is also one of the few survivors who isn’t completely alone. Her oddball neighbor, Harold Lauder (Owen Teague), also appears to be immune, and he has always harbored an uncomfortable crush on her. He claims he wants to protect her, but may actually see this as his chance to control her.  Frannie eventually will find a much safer companion in

There are others like Stu & Frannie, who are also immune, but it takes them a while to all find each other. And not all of the survivors are good people. They are pulling apart into two groups, who view each other first with suspicion, then with contempt, and they don’t see things the same way at all. (Another prescient similarity to our own world.) Here’s where things go supernatural. In the ashes of what used to be, the new tribes head for a clash that could fulfill the prophecy of Armageddon.

Another key character is Greg Kinnear’s Glen Bateman, a widowed sociology professor who was wasting away in grief long before the plague. There’s a musician, Larry Underwood (Jovan Adepo) who scores his first hit single just as life as we know it stops. Heather Graham plays a New York socialite struggling to survive in a necropolis. Rita Blakemoor was not in the original series (rolled in with Nadine’s character).  Henry Zaga plays a deaf man, Nick Andros, who understands human nature well but is not often understood in return, while Amber Heard is Nadine Cross, a conflicted woman drawn toward dark and selfish impulses.

Survivors who are drawn to decency unite around Mother Abagail, played by Whoopi Goldberg, who has endured the worst the world has to offer and kept her strength and empathy intact over the course of 108 years.

Nat Wolff (Paper Towns) plays the flip side of Stu—an equally hardscrabble survivor named Lloyd Henreid, who survives Captain Trips while behind bars after committing a murderous robbery. He and Stu watch the fall of the world from similar perspectives, albeit for different reasons.  Flagg (played by Alexander Skarsgård) is the only one of the major characters in The Stand who is not quite human. He is a demonic presence who appears throughout King’s work, and Skarsgård plays him here as a charismatic rockabilly demon.

WHAT WE WANT:

• Darker tone
• Inclusion of characters not seen in mini-series (The Kid, more time with Trashcan Man, Rita, the Zoo)
• Chronology
• Still faithfulness to the book