The deadly pandemic that opens CBS All Access’s stylish if stilted new take on Stephen King’s 1978 novel “The Stand” couldn’t be timelier for today’s TV viewers, or more terrifying: Loosed from a military weapons lab, the “Captain Trips” virus kills 99 percent of the population (dogs too!), quicker than any Karen can gripe about how masks are infringing on her constitutional rights.

Noses run, sputum flies and goiters swell to bursting. There’s a ruthless culling of the cast, including some welcome characters who turn out, sadly, to just be cameos – Hamish Linklater as a maverick epidemiologist; Heather Graham as a Manhattan penthouse dweller who eloquently expresses the existential angst: “This is stupid. Being alive when everyone else is dead. It’s like being the last person to leave a party.” (Later on, a character expresses hope that Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson has somehow been spared.)

The few survivors, apparently immune, cope in cities and towns that have been left in chaos or, more eerily, silence. This is perhaps “The Stand’s” greatest selling point at this particular moment, depicting an America that has ground to a complete halt. The only real dangers are other people, who may or may not have decided to be decent in dystopia.

Creeps do abound, starting with one Harold Lauder (“Mrs. Fletcher’s” Owen Teague), a nerdy, bullied teenager who discovers the only other person left in his small Maine town is Frannie Goldsmith (Odessa Young), the former babysitter he’s harbored a crush on all these years. Harold discovers that the old hypothetical “not if you were the last man on Earth” is all too true – she’s still not interested; he’s unhinged by his obsession for her.

In a somewhat effective structure of flashbacks that is vaguely reminiscent of “Lost,” we meet other random survivors: a good-hearted Texan with a can-do response to global collapse, Stu Redman (“Westworld’s” James Marsden), who meets a retired professor, Glen Bateman (“House of Cards’s” Greg Kinnear), who shares his optimism. Also, Larry Underwood (“Watchmen’s” Jovan Adepo), a middling rock star battling a drug addiction; Nick Andros (Henry Zaga), a deaf drifter who connects with a sweetly loyal, mentally disabled man, Tom Cullen (Brad William Henke). Soon there are others, more than a viewer might be able to recall, as the series jumps around.

They’re all following the subconscious call of a mysterious centenarian, Mother Abagail (Whoopi Goldberg), a prophet who appears in their dreams and invites them to join her outside Boulder, Colorado, and build a new community while she awaits divine guidance.

But somewhere out there (Las Vegas, of course), there’s also a powerful demon, Randall Flagg (“Big Little Lies’s” Alexander Skarsgard), who has summoned his own tribe of followers while he schemes to destroy Mother Abagail. Among his recruits are two people living undercover in her camp, spying for Flagg and preparing to follow his murderous commands. Imagine surviving the pandemic, only to get caught up in some kind of holy armageddon. (Hmm. Maybe I’ve just described 2021.)

As the devil, or whatever he calls himself, Skarsgard reaches for old tricks learned in past roles as baddies – vampire, abusive husband, svelte seducer – none of which manage to convey the necessary degree of malevolence.

Flagg’s orgiastic casino hell is a cartoonish place for the story to get stuck, but that shouldn’t surprise any TV viewer who has a healthy skepticism toward branding: “Based on the novel by Stephen King” can by now be regarded as a warning label as much as a lure, since pretty much everything the man has written has been turned into a movie or TV series, or is probably in some state of development.

This is not even “The Stand’s” first go-round on TV – a 1994 ABC miniseries managed to tell the story in four episodes, with commercials. Now it takes nine streaming episodes (six of which were made available for this review) to get the job done, with a new ending written by King himself.

Only a die-hard fan could get enthralled about that; the rest of us are perhaps still smarting from other heavily hyped but ultimately convoluted King properties that, as TV shows, were more tedious than chilling: “Under the Dome,” anyone? How about “The Mist,” “Castle Rock,” or “The Outsider”? First episodes, sure. But after a while? You can keep it. (One bright spot: Hulu’s 2016 adaptation of “11/22/63.”) King spent years telling the world how badly Stanley Kubrick interpreted “The Shining” with his 1980 film, but that always seemed like sour grapes. All Kubrick did was make “The Shining” 10 times scarier and 75 percent less bathetic than the book. As such, it’s one of the few King adaptations worth watching again and again.

“The Stand’s” producers and writers (including series developers Josh Boone and Benjamin Cavell) have no problems bringing out the story’s grisly and unsettling nature in the first two or three episodes, which make the series look better and edgier, at first, than it winds up being. This world come undone, an abandoned hellscape, is a fascinating place to explore, both sociologically and psychologically – it’s “The Walking Dead” without the inconvenience of zombies.

But too soon we are thrust into King’s symbolic, supernatural tussle between good and evil, involving a few too many characters and subplots, up to and including the heist of a nuclear bomb. The novel, in its original form, ran on to a length of 800-plus pages before King added another 500 or so pages, years later, in an “uncut” edition, which takes a certain gumption. This adaptation, which starts off succinctly, starts to strain as soon as it has to shoulder the biblical proportions. “The Stand” works better as a study in survivalist pluck than as a theological thunderdome.

“The Stand” (nine episodes) began streaming Thursday on CBS All Access with Episode 1, with a new episode available each Thursday.

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