Who knew the apocalypse could be this dull?

Of all the Stephen King novels I have read, The Stand occupies a very special place. It wasn’t the first – that was Salem’s Lot. It’s also not my favourite – that title belongs to Insomnia or maybe Needful Things. Nor is it the one I’ve read most (Salem’s Lot again). I first picked up The Stand on an autumn Friday evening way back in 1994 and eventually put it down again in the early hours of Sunday morning, having read it all the way through in one sitting. So when it comes to an adaptation of a novel that was so gripping I didn’t sleep until I’d finished it, you can understand expectations were high. Mick Garris’ four-part miniseries may adapt Stephen King’s magnum opus with pious fidelity, but it also does so with precious little imagination and a budget which can’t tretch to the story’s ambition. For all its sprawling canvas: plague, prophecy, and the eternal duel between good and evil, 1994’s The Stand can barely stay on its feet, tripping over both its own clumsy abridgement and the limitations of 1990s television.

King’s screenplay keeps faith with his novel’s broad architecture: the superflu known as Captain Trips escapes a government lab and scours humanity down to a few straggling survivors, who polarise around the saintly Mother Abagail (Ruby Dee) and the infernal Randall Flagg (Jamey Sheridan). But there’s an unevenness to the pacing – episode one is almost liesurely in its dwelling on the minutaie of Captain Trips’ escape from the lab – as if in writing the screenplay King started out reluctant to kill his darlings and then as time went on he ended up having to commit literary genocide just to keep to the episode count. All too often it gets bogged down in the necessary exposition and addresses the epic, sweeping changes afoot in the world with montages, references and innuendo as actually showing the downfall of civilisation as we know it would blow the budget in the first hour.

Entire storylines vanish or are collapsed into shorthand: the fraught moral tensions of the Boulder Free Zone become civic committee scenes drained of complexity, and the perilous westward journey is reduced to stock establishing shots. Supporting and even key figures like Trashcan Man (Matt Frewer) and Nadine Cross (Laura San Giacomo) are stripped of their rich backstories and inner lives, leaving only sketch outlines where the novel offered tragic depth.

Garris’ direction has the dutiful steadiness of a man ticking boxes, with his employer looking over his shoulder. His apocalypse looks quaint, a network-friendly wasteland of litter-blown streets and gentle lighting. His visual style is workmanlike at best, flattening King’s apocalyptic grandeur into a steady rotation of medium shots and moral homilies.

But if the direction lacks spark, some of the cast at least tries to kindle one. Gary Sinise brings quiet integrity to Stu Redman, grounding him in understatement rather than heroics, even if he lacks that leading man gravitas the piece needed. Rob Lowe, wordless as Nick Andros, conveys more emotion through silence than the script manages with dialogue and Jamey Sheridan’s Randall Flagg, all double denim and malicious grin is the one performer who seems to understand he’s in a myth. He brings a theatricality to The Stand that’s sorely missing elsewhere in this somewhat po-faced adaptation. While the cast benefits from the presence of the likes of Miguel Ferrer, Corin Nemec and cameos from Kathy Bates and Ed Harris, it’s Molly Ringwald who stands out the most, horribly miscast as Frannie Goldsmith. Whatever vulnerability the role demands is lost beneath a kind of reflexive perkiness; a 1980s teen movie sensibility that has no place in King’s scorched America.

Ruby Dee fares better, lending Mother Abagail the dignity and conviction the script struggles to articulate even if her characterisation feels a little obvious. Around her, though, the moral architecture of the piece buckles in the absence of the reader’s access to the charcater’s inner lives. The battle between good and evil, despite the extensive location shooting, feels stagey and staid and the climax descends into the sort of literalism that is the hallmark of artless adaptation. The infamous “Hand of God” sequence, which was divisive even in print, arrives here as an act of televisual self-sabotage – a special effect that drains the story of awe and replaces it with a National Lottery advert.

But the pacing remains The Stand‘s perhaps the gravest sin. For a miniseries that condenses a thousand-page novel into six hours, The Stand feels interminable. Scenes linger on trivialities, introductions overstay their welcome, and the outbreak sequence stretches long past its narrative purpose. By the time the survivors finally converge, momentum has already expired. In cutting for time, Garris and King lose the novel’s rhythm of despair and renewal, substituting sermon for structure.

And yet, for all its flaws, there’s a sincere effort to bring The Stand to the small screen here. King’s fascination with faith, guilt, and the human need for community still flickers in the corners, as though his prose were trying to claw its way out of the teleplay even if Garris’ skills are never quite up to finding a way to bring those ideas to life beyond rote recitation.

Time, of course, hasn’t been kind to The Stand, in much the same way it’s no longer kind to the viewer. What once seemed monumental now feels parochial, a relic of an era when “event television” meant big name casts, not bold visions and bravura storytelling. It’s earnest, overlong, and often inert, proof that even the apocalypse can be dull in the wrong hands.