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 2. Television


ADAPTING STEPHEN KING'S UNDER THE DOME: THE 2013 CBS SERIES MISSES THE POINT OF
THE NOVEL

By Eric Eisenberg
last updated July 28, 2022

Stephen King's first network series adaptation didn't go well.

 * 
 * 
 * 


(Image credit: CBS)


By 2013, Hollywood had managed to produce two different television shows based
on novels by Stephen King. The first was 2002’s The Dead Zone on USA Network,
which was ahead of its time in development, but ultimately exhausted its premise
in episodic storytelling before being cancelled and unable to satisfy any of its
macro-scale plots (those either from King’s text or those of the series’ own
invention). SyFy followed by airing Haven in 2010, and long before the end of
its third of five seasons it had totally dismissed its “source material,” the
2005 book The Colorado Kid. Needless to say, the art had not been perfected.



There was already an established lesson to be learned about on-going projects
opting to stray from Stephen King’s creation and intent, but this was not
registered in the creation of Under The Dome: the CBS series executive produced
by King and Steven Spielberg, and originally developed by Brian K. Vaughn.



While some exceptional talent brought the show to life, this is not a success
story.




As Vaughn told Entertainment Weekly in 2013, Stephen King gave the permission to
treat his 2009 novel more as a place to start and not treat his writing as the
exclusive way to tell the story. Said the Season 1 showrunner,



> He told us, ‘Really use the book as a jumping off point. Use the characters,
> use the themes, but don’t be afraid to go to new places.'

Brian K. Vaughn, who had network television experience via ABC’s hit series
Lost, and the writers proved to have no issue deviating from the book, and while
the first run of 13 episodes could be called tolerable, its quality took a sharp
decline in both Season 2 and Season 3 with flat, indistinguishable characters
and goofy science-fiction sensibilities.



So where did things go wrong? Allow me to explain as we take a peek Under The
Dome for this week’s Adapting Stephen King.



(Image credit: CBS)


WHAT UNDER THE DOME IS ABOUT

Stephen King has a well-earned reputation for being prolific, having at least
one book published every year – and only making that reputation more impressive
is knowing that there are also a number of stories he writes that either never
get finished or never see the light of day. There’s actually a dedicated
Wikipedia page about these projects.

This was very nearly the fate of Under The Dome. As I noted above, the novel was
published in 2009, but it was all the way back in 1976 – the year between the
release of Salem’s Lot and The Shining – that Stephen King wrote the epic’s
first 75 pages. He spent two weeks writing about the day a mysterious dome fell
over the town of Chester’s Mill, Maine, cutting the residents off from the rest
of the world, but then, in his own words, he “crept away from it with [his] tail
between [his] legs.”

King explains in the Author’s Note at the end of Under The Dome that he became
overwhelmed by the story and began to feel that he bit off more than he could
chew with the idea. First there was the fact that he was going to be juggling a
vast ensemble of characters, and secondly he was intimidated by the amount of
research that the narrative would require to be realistic. He was prepared to
put the people of Chester’s Mill through an ecological nightmare through the
plot, but he didn’t have the understanding of the science to properly execute it
in his writing.

That 75-page manuscript was eventually lost, but the idea for Under The Dome
never left Stephen King’s mind, and a few years later he took another crack at
it – this time approaching the story with the title The Cannibals. The author
has a section about it on his official website, and he dates the work to when he
was in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in the early 1980s working with George A. Romero
on 1982’s Creepshow. The plot was rejiggered so that the setting would be a
“depressing suburban apartment complex” like the one where he was staying, and
he wrote almost five hundred pages… but again he hit a wall.

What eventually let Stephen King finish Under The Dome was a key collaboration.
In the summer of 2007, the writer asked his friend Russ Dorr, a physician’s
assistant whom he had previously consulted on The Stand and other books, to take
on the role of head researcher for the project. King credits a number of the
book’s most inventive survival moments to Dorr, including the homemade radiation
suits made with lead sheeting and the idea to use car tires like oxygen tanks
when the atmosphere turns poisonous. It took decades of work, but Under The Dome
hit stores on November 10, 2009.

The book shares a lot in common with Stephen King’s “The Mist,” in that it
features a supernatural occurrence as an inciting incident (the dome falling
over Chester’s Mill), but a great deal of the horror is rooted in the worst
aspects of human nature. It’s a marathon read with sections and chapters told
from more than a dozen different perspectives from around the small Maine town,
chronicling the chaos that erupts not just from the panic following the
disaster, but criminality in the local government that existed prior.

Leading Team Rational is Dale “Barbie” Barbara, a former soldier-turned-fry cook
whom President Barack Obama himself promotes to Colonel during the crisis; and
Julia Shumway, the middle-aged right wing Editor In Chief of the local
newspaper. Unfortunately, they have to compete for leadership and the hearts and
minds of the citizenship with “Big” Jim Rennie, the town’s second selectman and
a religious zealot/fascist who sees nothing but opportunity when the dome comes
down.



(Image credit: CBS)


HOW UNDER THE DOME DIFFERS FROM STEPHEN KING’S BOOK

Under The Dome has the distinction of being the first fully serialized on-going
series based on a Stephen King book, so there really did exist the opportunity
to adapt the massive tome that is the source material faithfully – but there is
a key change in approach between the two works that defines why the book and the
show are radically different. While King wrote the novel because of a
fascination with how normal, post-9/11 Americans would react in a fantastical
circumstance, the TV writers and network evidently felt that material wouldn’t
bring viewers back week-to-week, and thusly opted to slather everything in
sci-fi nonsense.

There is most definitely a sci-fi aspect to the book, as it’s revealed at the
end that the dome is the creation of alien children doing the equivalent of
burning ants with a magnifying glass. But that’s a minor fraction of the
storytelling compared to the sinister machinations of “Big” Jim Rennie – who
secretly incites a riot at the town grocery store as an excuse for increasing
the size of the police force (a police force that he controls), and frames Dale
“Barbie” Barbara for a quadruple homicide in order to hide murders that he
himself has committed and keep under wraps the massive meth lab that he has been
running for years with government resources.

Instead of this excellent human drama, the CBS series starts by suggesting the
dome has a kind of will of its own, its power generator taking the form of a
black egg that occasionally glows pink and is looking for four “hands” to
communicate with it. After a number of plot zig zags in the first 26 episodes
(suggesting the writers had no idea where the story was headed), it’s eventually
revealed in Season 3 that the dome was created as a kind of incubator by a
body-snatching extraterrestrial race. By the end of the show’s run, the plot
actually has more in common with The Tommyknockers than Under The Dome –
complete with a prominent role played by Marg Helgenberger (the star of the
dreadful 1993 miniseries).

The characters in the ensemble cast of the series share names with counterparts
in the book, but there isn’t a single one of them who is directly translated.
The heroic Barbie, played by Mike Vogel, for example, is introduced in the very
first scene as a shady debt collector who murders the husband of Julia Shumway –
who, played by Rachelle Lefevre, is made to be decades younger than the
character in the novel and isn’t a lifelong Chester’s Mill resident. Dean
Norris’ “Big” Jim is made to be far less sly and psychotic, and by Season 2 he
even ceases to be an antagonist as his villainy is outweighed by plot.

Those are all big changes, but they’re actually some of the most subtle
performed by the Under The Dome series. Jim’s son, Junior Rennie (Alexander
Koch), isn’t depicted as having a brain tumor that sends him into homicidal
fits, and in the first two seasons he’s bizarrely aligned with the show’s
protagonists. Even without the undiagnosed cancer he does still attack Angie
McAlister (Britt Robertson) in the pilot episode, but he notably doesn’t kill
her, and instead locks her up in his father’s bomb shelter – leaving her to be a
recurring character on the show. Angie is eventually killed in the Season 2
premiere by Sam Verdreaux (Eddie Cahill)… who isn’t the town drunk described in
Stephen King’s novel, but instead a recovering alcoholic and former EMT who
lives in isolation and is made to be “Big” Jim’s ex-brother-in-law/Junior’s
uncle.

Everything that I’ve described here is really only scratching the surface when
it comes to comparing and contrasting Under The Dome and the CBS series
adaptation (I haven’t even mentioned all of the characters eliminated
completely). Really, they’re completely different creations that share a title,
a setting, character names, and a set-up… and that’s pretty much it.



(Image credit: CBS)


IS IT WORTHY OF THE KING?

Prior to the release of the most recent adaptation of The Stand in 2020, Stephen
King spoke with the New York Times about his history with projects on the small
screen. When it came to the subject of Under The Dome, he wasn’t exactly
effusive:

> The first few episodes were great, but the thing was, what CBS wanted was
> basically meatloaf — nothing too challenging, something to just fill some
> hours… It went off the rails [and] descended into complete mediocrity.

I would argue that Stephen King is being polite there, as Under The Dome is
actually quite a bit worse than mediocre. It’s a show that doesn’t have any
themes, and doesn’t make an attempt to say anything about anything. While the
writers of the show might call the characters “complex” for their frequent moral
swings, the more apt adjective would be “undefined,” as personal motives morph
episode-to-episode.

While the 2002 TV series The Dead Zone was ahead of its time in trying to
serialize a very structured book before being forced into being a procedural,
Under The Dome is the exact opposite – which is to say that it’s a wasted
opportunity. A three-season, 39 episode series really is the ideal way one could
imagine adapting the book that Stephen King wrote, but the 2013 show goes about
it in a terrible way, and as a result a proper live-action take may never get
made.



(Image credit: CBS)


HOW TO WATCH UNDER THE DOME

If I haven’t successfully warded off your interest in watching Under The Dome,
you can stream all three seasons of the show with a few clicks if you have a
Paramount+ subscription. Even without one you still have some digital options.
If you’re not one who minds commercial interruptions, it’s available to watch on
Pluto TV, and you can purchase individual episodes on Amazon Prime Video. For
physical media collectors and those trying to build the Ultimate Stephen King
Collection, you can buy Season 1, Season 2, and Season 3 on Blu-ray (the
Complete Series box set is DVD only).

For next week’s column, I’ll be examining yet another interesting first in the
history of Stephen King adaptations: the first remake of an adaptation that had
already been remade. In addition to seeing the premiere of Under The Dome, 2013
was also the year that director Kimberly Peirce’s Carrie hit theaters – a new
big screen take on King’s seminal novel following Brian De Palma’s 1976 classic
and the 2002 TV movie. Look for the feature in CinemaBlend’s Movies section next
Wednesday, and in the meantime click through the banners below to discover all
of the previous installments.



(Image credit: )



(Image credit: CBS)



(Image credit: ABC)



(Image credit: USA Network)



(Image credit: Dimension Films)



(Image credit: Syfy)


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Eric Eisenberg
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Assistant Managing Editor

NJ native who calls LA home and lives in a Dreamatorium. A decade-plus
CinemaBlend veteran who is endlessly enthusiastic about the career he’s dreamt
of since seventh grade.

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