I’m usually not a fan of films and TV shows based on Stephen King’s fiction, finding them emphasizing what I don’t like about King’s work while leaving out the critical atmospheric horror that in my view makes it so deep and penetrating. A few notable exceptions come to mind, such as the new IT, THE MIST, and THE SHINING. When an updated adaptation of THE STAND released from CBS Productions, I’d heard a few bad things, but I decided to give it a shot.

The series is overall faithful to the novel with some innovations and numerous shortcuts for time. One big innovation is time jumps between past and present, which allows the show to explore certain characters with some depth before introducing us to the next. I didn’t mind that at all, and I thought it added something. The production quality is fairly good, and with the first episode, I was somewhat hopeful and thinking it wasn’t all that bad. Unfortunately, for me, the series became progressively sloppier until I gave up on it near the end.

I think the series did a lot of things well, but overall it has a TV sheen to it, with everybody wearing brand-new clothes and driving shiny new cars because ka-ching, you gotta have those product placements. The characters are all one-note and overly familiar archtypes, with zero complexity and almost no back story. Numerous shortcuts from the source material look like, well, shortcuts. Randall Flagg’s Babylon in Vegas doesn’t look evil so much as silly, and many of the horror elements, including Flagg himself, similarly come across as silly rather than scary or menacing. The actors are miscast, with few seeming to feel comfortable in their role, though there were a few notable exceptions, in particular Brad William Henke as Tom Cullen.

Overall, I think if you’re going to adapt a classic horror novel that is highly familiar with your core audience, you should stick with the source material and if you don’t, then you should innovate in a way that improves or adds to the story rather than one that appears as a shortcut. With so much great stuff to work with, this new adaptation of THE STAND had the potential to be extremely dark, fun, and surprising. Instead, it comes across as the usual, with little surprising. Clearly, a lot of effort went into it, and there are again good qualities, but I watched it hoping for something both familiar and unexpected, and ended up bored. It’s a shame, as I think of what somebody like Frank Darabont could have accomplished with this with a budget and the gloves off. It makes me wonder why it’s so hard to adapt Stephen King’s work onto the screen?

SWEET HOME (2020, streaming on Netflix) is a Korean apocalyptic drama based on a popular webtoon. I tried it on a lark and found it an extremely surprising and ultimately satisfying kitchen sink of apocalyptic tropes made fresh with likeable, complex characters.

The trailer does not do the series justice. Watching it, I expected an over-the-top comedy similar to ZOMBIELAND with a little Z NATION thrown in, only with monsters instead of zombies. It certain has its comedic moments, though it isn’t so comedic as it is charming. The show gets pretty dark and grim at times, and it doesn’t mind punching you in the feels.

So SWEET HOME begins in a high-rise multifamily building that is on the run-down side. Initially, we’re introduced to various people who live there, focusing on a troubled teen who wants to kill himself. He’s not very likeable at the start, and it’s uncertain where this thing is going. As the episode and subsequent episodes progress, we’re introduced to a pretty large cast, whom we get to know in both the present and via short-and-sweet flashbacks, and even the minor characters are given their moments of development and depth.

Pretty quickly, we find out that people are turning into monsters. The special effects are hit or miss, and at first the monsters are a little corny, but they’re cool in their variety, what powers they have, and their origin. A few are downright creepy. The survivors of the initial onslaught find themselves trapped in the building, where they develop into a community and try to survive. Their biggest struggle is to hold on to their humanity as things get worse and worse, while a few who are infected must literally fight to stay human. The result is a story about humanity under stress, survival, community, and occasionally sacrifice and heroism.

So I highly recommend this one–for its fun monster element, likeable and complex characters, usually realistic choices and challenges, multitude of themes, and dramatic punch.

Season 3 of the moody, dark, and apocalyptic Netflix series THE DARK concluded what can only be described as one of the most truly remarkable science-fiction series, so odd and complex it’s one of those TV series you’re surprised got made. Season 3 builds upon the complex relationships and central time travel mystery from the first two seasons while adding another dimension and bringing the whole thing to a powerful and decisive finish.

This was an enjoyable but difficult series to watch. I would have appreciated its intricate details more if I were able to binge-watch it from start to finish, which begs for a second viewing now that the work is complete and I kind of know what’s going on, who’s who in what time period, and how they’re related. The show is not really three discrete seasons but a single vision meticulously planned from the first episode. And holy crap, it’s incredible when you see the whole thing.

During the second season, I have to admit I began to get frustrated with it. Too often, characters appear from offstage to deliver speeches short on real details and long on bland philosophy, while the time travel itself started to rely more and more heavily on the bootstrap paradox. This is a paradox in time travel where, for example, a man has a child, the child goes back in time and has his own child, and that child turns out to be boy’s father (each is the father of the other), resulting in time travel literally creating people, events, and objects living in a time loop. In many movies such as ARRIVAL, it provides an answer or solution that crashes into the plot as deus ex machina, and in THE DARK, it started to feel like the TV show LOST, constantly teasing mysteries that once revealed didn’t really mean anything. THE DARK, however, fooled me, as the bootstrap paradox became the central point of the show, the “knot” the characters seek to maintain or unravel depending on the faction, and with the key to unraveling it being finding the “origin,” the prime mover to a swirling, massive set of events occurring in an endless loop.

Holy crap, it’s dense, it’s enormously atmospheric, it’s tragic, and it’s possibly the work of mad genius. THE DARK isn’t for everybody, but if you like intelligent sci-fi, check it out.