Endgame Viable

Another post I started last week and I’m trying to kick out of my drafts before it gets too old.

What if Carrie but Stranger Things and cyberbullying PSA and 8 hours instead of 2?

That was my impression of Amazon’s new 8-episode series Carrie.

Stephen King is near and dear to my heart, so I usually consume whatever comes along out of his works. Carrie was Stephen King’s first hit, and it was a pretty short novel if I remember right. Nowhere near enough for an 8-episode series.

So they added a lot. I mean, a lot. Whole new characters and storylines. At one point it even turned into a Battlestar Galactica cast reunion.

Was it an improvement? Not really. The original is a tight, almost Biblical parable. The reimagination is kind of a mixed bag of messages and a setup for … something.

Because it was so long, Carrie’s trademark march toward tragedy was almost a background plot, which sucked a lot of the tension out of it. Especially the middle part.

The middle part was largely a campaign against cyberbullying in school, and the dangers of social media on young minds. Not a terrible idea, but a side track to what I consider to be the main story theme, which revolves around fish-out-of-water Carrie, a rigidly traditional mom, teenage social awkwardness, and a tragic misunderstanding at a prom.

In the end, it wasn’t bad. I was engaged throughout. I thought the performances were solid, and the character decisions justifiable.

But I found many scenes uncomfortable to watch, especially in the first half, which I attribute to my foreknowledge of how the story would later turn out. It’s not fun to watch one character obviously exploiting another character, nor is it fun to watch characters self-destructing.

However, the series felt a little exploitative of the source material. Like it existed only to setup a new cinematic universe that nobody asked for, and a second season that goes into territory that can’t possibly be any good. A classic streaming situation where the first season has a perfectly good ending, but they somehow have to keep making new seasons anyway because business, baby.

P.S. I used a picture of Stephen King for simplicity, though I know he had nothing to do with the production. A picture of Mike Flanagan would have been more appropriate.