'The Stand' Doesn't Play by the Book

Stephen King has long had his issues with ending his books, which is the downside of writing without outlines and letting the story travel wherever makes sense in the moment. Beginnings, though? Few writers have ever been stronger at them, and few King novels begin better than his 1978 post-apocalyptic opus The Stand.  The novel opens with a soldier escaping a top-secret military facility as a plague has been unleashed that kills everyone around him. He grabs his wife and daughter, and takes off into the night, unwittingly spreading this superflu (soon known as Captain Trips) around the entire world, until only a tiny fraction of the global population has survived. The book’s early chapters are so relentless, and so good at introducing core characters like Texas everyman Stu Redman and junkie musician Larry Underwood, that the first few hundred pages fly by, even in the vastly expanded 1990 re-release. The 1994 ABC miniseries adaptation has its flaws, but it at least recognized the power of King’s opening, which in TV form played out to Blue Oyster Cult’s “Don’t Fear the Reaper,” back before that song was most associated with the phrase “more cowbell.”   Reviews What to Stream This January: 12 Movies and Shows Worth Watching Online Best Movies/ TV to See in Dec.: 'Wonder Woman 1984,' 'Mank,' New 'Euphoria' Reviews All 173 of Taylor Swift's Songs, Ranked Paul McCartney's 40 Greatest Solo Songs  Now The Stand is back on television again, this time as a nine-episode miniseries on CBS All Access. In some ways, it’s an improvement on the ABC version, thanks to several strong lead performances (particularly Alexander Skarsgård as the Devil-ish villain, Randall Flagg, and James Marsden in his most convincing aw-shucks, All-American mode as Stu) and advances in digital effects and makeup that allow for a more believable end of the world than was possible to show a quarter-century ago.  But this new Stand is troubling from the start — or, rather, from where it starts. Because for some baffling reason, this new version opts to begin in the middle.  We do eventually see the soldier’s escape, and what people like Stu, Larry (Jovan Adepo), and Frannie Goldsmith (Odessa Young) experienced in the early days of the Captain Trips outbreak. But we see them out of order, and instead open five months after the end of the world as we know it, with a community of survivors already formed in Boulder, Colorado, and with Frannie’s creepy childhood neighbor Harold Lauder (Owen Teague) helping to dispose of the many, many dead bodies the plague left behind. From there, the miniseries bounces backward and forward in time, between events in Boulder, the plague, and the arduous journeys our heroes took to find Mother Abagail (Whoopi Goldberg), the wise, old woman who represents the forces of light opposite Flagg’s evil, decadent community in Las Vegas.  Movies and TV shows have been using out-of-sequence storytelling forever, often as a way to hook the audience o