“That’s not a luxury that our people have. “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. The showrunners said they loved Contagion-which is why they didn’t think it was necessary to repeat Contagion. “It was very surreal, obviously, to start to realize that there was a creeping pandemic the way there was at the beginning of our show,” Cavell says. The show had to wrap production four days early in March when COVID-19 began to shut down North America, but, as of now, CBS All Access plans to proceed with the release. It’s hard to know what our world will feel like when The Stand begins its nine-episode run, but the coronavirus crisis has only intensified interest in movies like Contagion and Outbreak. It’s interesting to see a story about people who are rebuilding it from the ground up.” Now, so much of that is being ripped down to the studs. “Over the last however-many years, we have sort of taken for granted the structure of democracy. “It’s about the fundamental questions of what society owes the individual and what we owe to each other,” says Cavell. (The exact launch date is still to be determined.) Showrunners Benjamin Cavell and Taylor Elmore, who first worked together on Justified, are quick to point out that King layered in reassuring themes along with the terrifying ones.

17 in the ominous shadow of an actual global pandemic. The novel remains one of the author’s greatest achievements, and a new limited series adaptation is headed to CBS All Access on Dec. “At some point, people do have to make a stand.”

When there are no rules, his thinking went, survivors have to make a choice: Do you go full Darwin and indulge dark, selfish instincts or do what’s right for the sake of others? “I wanted to write about bravery,” says King. He wanted his 1978 book about a global pandemic that takes all but a fraction of human life with it to be called The Stand. He didn’t call it The Disease or The End of the World As We Know It or anything that nihilistic. S tephen King didn’t call his novel The Virus.

The stand book