The first episode of the new TV series “The Stand” has some eerie similarities to what’s going on in the world today, including news reports of an infectious disease spreading quickly through the population and government officials calling for limits on mass gatherings.

But Stephen King, who wrote the 1978 novel the series is based on, says there are some pretty stark differences between COVID-19 and the killer disease in “The Stand” that wipes out 99 percent of the world’s population in weeks. Though as “The Stand” hits TV screens this week, in the middle of pandemic, it may raise some pertinent questions, King says.

“The coronavirus is killing a very small percentage of people it infects; the one I developed (in ‘The Stand’), if you catch it, you’re dead,” said King, 73, Maine’s most famous author, from his winter home in Florida. “This story is what happens when a disease wipes out most of the population. The major thing is whether people relate to the characters, especially the good guys, because everyone sees themselves as a good guy. The resonant question for people in these times is, ‘How would I behave if something like this happened?’ ”

Stephen King’s “The Stand” will debut Thursday as a streaming TV series on CBS All Access. Image from video courtesy of “Late Show with Stephen Colbert”

The nine-episode series “The Stand” premieres Thursday on the CBS All Access streaming service, with new episodes to be released each week. It stars James Marsden as Stu Redman and Whoopi Goldberg as Mother Abagail, among the good guys, and Alexander Skarsgard as Randall Flagg leading the bad guys. The disease in the book and series is a weaponized strain of flu developed by the U.S. military and apparently accidentally released into the world. The series was filmed mostly in 2019 in British Columbia, Canada, and Las Vegas. Production wrapped up early this year before the COVID-19 pandemic hit the U.S.

“I don’t know if people will watch it or not. Maybe if they have read the book, they’ll want to see how it’s changed,” said King. “I don’t know whether people might see it as an escape, given the current situation, since it’s much worse than coronavirus.”

FIT FOR SCREENING

At least 80 TV shows or films have been made from King’s writing during his 50-plus-year career, a testament to the power of King’s stories and characters, as well as the size of his fan base. He’s sold more than 350 million books and his movies have generated more than $2 billion in box office revenue, or an average of $56 million per film, according to Fortune magazine.

Some of King’s stories get made into films or TV series more than once. “The Stand” is one of them. A 1994 ABC TV four-part miniseries starred Gary Sinise as Redman, Ruby Dee as Mother Abagail, Jamey Sheridan as Flagg and Molly Ringwald as Frannie Goldsmith. Australian actress Odessa Young plays Goldsmith in this new version.

Jovan Adepo, left, as Larry Underwood and James Marsden, right, as Stu Redman in “The Stand.” Photo by Robert Falconer/CBS

In recent years, there were discussions with production companies about making a feature length film of the story, but it was decided a series would work better for a novel that’s more than 1,000 pages, King said. He also likes some of the things that have been changed in this new series, from the book and the previous mini-series, including having more ethnic diversity represented among the survivors. Because, as King points out, “You wouldn’t only have white people surviving the pandemic.”

The series on CBS All Access will be more graphic when it comes to death and sex. The mini-series came out in 1994, when broadcast networks like ABC were the main way for people to see anything on TV and streaming services with niche audiences didn’t exist. Thinking of its mainstream audience, ABC didn’t want the “piles of dead bodies” that would be apparent in a scenario where 99 percent of the world is wiped out, King said.

Though King got to look over scripts and casting decisions for this new version of “The Stand,” he says he wasn’t that involved with the production. But his son, writer Owen King, was. The younger King, 43, worked as a writer on most of the episodes, joining the producers and other writers in the “writer’s room” to hash out the story.

Owen King said his goal in working on the series was to be true to the novel while updating it for 2020. But he said the book’s main themes – faith, fellowship and the temptations of fear and greed – continue to resonate today. Like his father, Owen King said that the pandemic in “The Stand” really can’t be compared to what’s going on today. He and other writers could not have foreseen something like the current pandemic when they wrote the series.

“In terms of the pandemic that we’re living through, and the pandemic that’s depicted in ‘The Stand,’ I wouldn’t want to make any comparison,” Owen King wrote in an email to the Press Herald. “The devastating loss of real lives, the real suffering that people are going through, it’s not the same thing as the events in a story of the supernatural, and of course, we wrote the show long before the pandemic began.”

Alexander Skarsgård, left, as Randall Flagg in “The Stand.” Robert Falconer

Stephen King said he first got the idea for the “The Stand” after hearing a radio story about U.S. Army aerial nerve gas experiments that led to the death of 6,000 sheep in Utah in 1968. So in “The Stand,” the military is developing a killer strain of disease to be used as a weapon. But the series doesn’t spend a lot of time on people actually dealing with a pandemic – no matter what its causes – but focuses more on the aftermath and how the few survivors struggle with good and evil while trying to rebuild their version of society. That’s where the supernatural comes in, in terms of the figures and forces guiding and driving the survivors.

FOR FANS, BY FANS

The first hourlong episode, which will be available Thursday, starts by showing some of those masses of dead bodies, but quickly cuts back and forth to show the characters shortly before the outbreak. Viewers are introduced to Stu Redman outside a gas station in Arnette, Texas, hanging out with co-workers as they watch a car crash into the building. The driver, we find out later in the episode, has been driving all night with his family to try an escape a leak at the facility where the weaponized flu strain was developed.

The first episode also introduces viewers to Goldsmith, a college-aged woman in Ogunquit, and her teenage neighbor Harold Lauder, whom she used to babysit. The scenes set in Ogunquit were shot in or around Vancouver in British Columbia, though there are views of beaches and a beach-side amusement area. The episode goes back and forth in time, so viewers get a sense early of the characters’ backstories and their place in the social structure of the survivors, basically two groups. In the book, the pandemic itself lasts much longer.

Whoopi Goldberg as Mother Abagail in the CBS All Access series “The Stand.” Photo by Robert Falconer/CBS

“A non-linear narrative differentiates us from the first series, and people don’t have to see three episodes of death and dying before getting to the meat of the story,” said executive producer and co-creator Benjamin Cavell, in a Zoom call with reporters Dec. 3. “Good and evil, light and dark, that’s our story.”

Often, the filmmakers and actors who work on a King project turn out to be big fans, as was the case in “The Stand.” So to get the blessing of King to work with his words is a big deal. Cavell said it was “hugely inspiring” to have King sign off on the cast, scripts and direction of the series, to basically have the author’s approval for what they were doing.

“Taylor and I are huge Stephen King fans,” said Cavell, referring to co-executive producer Taylor Elmore. “It felt like we were empowered to take the story in the direction it was taking us.”

One of the biggest names in the cast is Goldberg, who won a best supporting actor Oscar for “Ghost” in 1990. She plays Mother Abagail, who comes to some pandemic survivors in a dream and urges them to make their “stand” against the darker forces at work. On ABC’s “The View,” Goldberg said she had wanted to play the role in the 1994 series, but she had other commitments at the time.

Greg Kinnear, who was nominated for a best supporting actor Oscar for “As Good as It Gets” in 1997, plays former college professor Glen Bateman, part of the group of survivors trying to rebuild. In his own Zoom conference call with reporters, Kinnear said that he had read “The Stand” while in high school and it “really captured” him. He said he was also pleased that he got through the whole book, as he wasn’t used to reading such long books at the time.

“Stephen is such an amazing storyteller,” said Kinnear. “There’s something very believable about the way he writes.”

Owen Teague as Harold Lauder in “The Stand,” based on the novel by Stephen King. Photo by Robert Falconer/CBS

Marsden, who as Redman is one of the show’s leads, has been in a variety of film and TV projects in recent years, including in the FX mini-series “Mrs. America” earlier this year and the films “X-Men: Days of Future Past” and “Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues.” He had a recurring role as Tina Fey’s boyfriend in NBC’s “30 Rock.” Skarsgard, another lead in the show, is best known for roles in the HBO fantasy/horror series “True Blood” and the HBO mystery series “Big Little Lies.”

King, who grew up in Durham and went to Lisbon Falls High School, continues to spend much of the year in Maine but said he and his wife, Tabitha, don’t spend much time in their Bangor home – a famous tourist attraction in that city – as it’s being converted into a writer’s retreat and archive of his work. They now split most of their time between their homes in Florida and western Maine.

King said his main contribution to “The Stand” series was an “epilogue” he wrote that appears in the last episode. At his age and this point in his career, he didn’t want to be more involved than that. When he takes on the job of actually writing the scripts for a TV show or movie based on his work, it’s a “really big commitment” and takes time away from his other writing. King has published more than 60 novels and 140 stories, essays or shorter pieces. He said ideas for books don’t come to him as fast as they used to, but he does have a book coming out in March, a crime novel called “Later.”

He said he does have another book idea percolating in his brain right now, but it doesn’t seem “terrific.” In other words, it’s not up to his standards, idea-wise.

“The one coming out in March, that one screamed to me to be written,” said King.

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