Under The Dome (tv series)

Apparently life is long enough to thread crap on this forum about a show many of us did enjoy so far and enjoy discussing..........................

 

I give the first episode a "meh" but will keep on watching. Nothing else on during the summer and hopefully it gets better as it goes. I haven't read the book but I know how it ends and thankfully they won't be using that ending...supposedly.

 

When King is on, he does an exceptional job but over the last decade (maybe more) he's become confused and come to believe that a book that is a doorstop is a good one regardless of whether the story could have been told in one third of the pages.

I read Under the Dome and it would have made a good Twilight Zone episode....over forty years ago (and the idea is pretty common). He doesn't do anything special with the idea and it's just not a good novel.

Somebody looked at this and thought it could be the next "Lost" (albeit with an ending that was thought out from the beginning).

The actors are promising and dramatically if they can impove on the source, it could be good. King has written the occasional good novel over the last twenty years but I've found a lot of them to be disappointing.

I have a hard time seeing how this can be stretched beyond 13 episodes...heck 13 episodes is stretching it.

Perhaps this will be one of those occasions where those workin gon the series will improve ths weak source material.

 

Absolutely.

I think it's a little more than that, but it's certainly not worth a 13-hour $50 million mini-series. I bet for a fact you could tell the story in 3 hours, 4 tops.

King has said that their new ending is so good, he wishes he had thought of it first! And the author has been very, very critical of some of the movies of his work.

 

What if something happened that polluted all the air in a relatively short amount of time? And yes, water is an issue, too. So is food. So is sewage, fuel, and all the other things we use every day. Hell, half the people here would go berserk in 24 hours if they had no internet.

No clouds inside the Dome, and it's summertime (though the TV version was filmed in North Carolina last winter). I got the feeling the Dome was something like 2 or 3 miles in diameter, and there's about 1000 people in the town of Chester's Mill when the Dome first appears.

To me, one of the most interesting parts of the story are the military people outside the Dome, which we saw in the first episode. King has a lot of fairly strong political undertones in the story, and let's just say he's not a fan of conservative hawkish politicians.

 

Pot Meet Kettle...

 

If there's no clouds in a dome that's two or three miles in diameter then they've made a mistake. There'd be clouds. Hell, there can be clouds in the Vertical Assembly Building at Cape Canaveral!

As for pollution in a sealed dome, yes I take your point. They'd better cut down on the beans immediately!

 

I've been in the VAB, and they had good days and bad days. What the NASA engineers told us is that it's more like heavy fog and condensation, not rain per se. It's only 50 stories tall (albeit 8 acres of area). Let's assume this the town had a dry day without any low-level clouds, so no clouds got into the dome when it materialized.

Farts are the least of their problems. I was just telling a friend of mine today, the show is really a morality play, more of a psychological drama about a dysfunctional society that collapses during a state of emergency. If LA got hit by a 10.0 earthquake tomorrow, and every freeway fell down, every gas line blew, every water line ruptured, and all the electrical lines went down, we'd have the same problems in a week. Maybe worse. If you can't drive more than a couple of blocks because the roads have truck-sized holes in them, where can you go? How far can you walk? If you do walk, how long before you run into somebody who wants something you have?

I think the main issue going on is how fragile our world is, and how quickly things can go very badly when law and order end, and chaos and craziness take over. You find out very quickly who your real friends are, and also how badly certain kinds of people can be bent by having a little power.

 

Caught up with the pilot episode last night, it was entertaining enough for me to tune in next week.

 

Probably not religion. The radio station on TV isn't Christian and the one character that was spouting religious quotes in the book has not done it so far on TV. They seem to have scrubbed that part from the story.

 

At some point wouldn't they die of carbon monoxide poisoning if the Dome is a 100% sealed environment? I watched the first episode, have zero knowledge of the book and I find the concept intriguing in a morbid way, there's no way this can end well unless they find a way out. It might be fun for the first few days but once the resources start to run low it's going to get ugly.

 

True. But the Christian radio station played a major part in the novel. To me, this is an example of the TV version getting watered down.

It's more complicated than that. I think the biggest threats to the people's survival are themselves.

 

Network television is almost always totally devoid of seriously religious characters or content, unless a character happens to be a priest or something. That was probably the first thing cut from the television adaptation.

 

Otherwise known as Network is chicken, afraid to anger the religious right.

 

This was a very strong story element in the novel, so it's interesting that King allowed them to change it. The overall plot isn't affected. King has dealt with religion before -- both pro and con -- and even had a very important sympathetic priest as a character in both Salem's Lot and The Dark Tower (and it's the same guy, Father Callahan). Very good person, admirable despite his flaws.

 

AGAIN, PLEASE STOP TALKING ABOUT WHAT HAPPENS IN THE BOOK, AND SPOILING THINGS FOR THOSE JUST WATCHING THE SHOW.

 

I agree. I am just going to watch the show and find certain comments in this thread to border on spoilers. Maybe there should be two theads, one for the show only and another for the show vs. the novel.

 

Yes. There are people who haven't yet read the book, so I really don't think we should be talking about how the mysterious stranger is actually an alien is able to make people think he looks like a human. Just let people discover that as it unfolds.

 

I think they'll be more surprised when they find out that the police chief doesn't have a pacemaker but is actually a robot fuelled by all that propane. But in deference to those who don't know the story I won't mention it.

 

LOL!

If that turns out to be true, I will throw a rotten tomato in Canada's general direction.

 

I knew it. I knew it!

 

That explains why, in the preview, he says "if the townfolk don't like it, they can bite my shiny metal ass!"

 

For the record I have been careful to not spoil anything. I've commented on differences between the book and the movie. If it's different, it isn't happening on TV.

 

Speaking of differences between the novel and the TV show, apparently, author King has been deluged with complaints from his many fans. He just released the following statement [and this is for real]:

For those of you out there in Constant Reader Land who are feeling miffed because the TV version of Under the Dome varies considerably from the book version, here's a little story.

Near the end of his life, and long after his greatest novels were written, James M. Cain agreed to be interviewed by a student reporter who covered culture and the arts for his college newspaper. This young man began his time with Cain by bemoaning how Hollywood had changed books such as The Postman Always Rings Twice and Double Indemnity. Before he could properly get into his rant, the old man interrupted him by pointing to a shelf of books behind his desk. "The movies didn't change them a bit, son," he said. "They're all right up there. Every word is the same as when I wrote them."

I feel the same way about Under the Dome. If you loved the book when you first read it, it's still there for your perusal. But that doesn't mean the TV series is bad, because it's not. In fact, it's very good. And, if you look closely, you'll see that most of my characters are still there, although some have been combined and others have changed jobs. That's also true of the big stuff, like the supermarket riot, the reason for all that propane storage, and the book's thematic concerns with diminishing resources.

Many of the changes wrought by Brian K. Vaughan and his team of writers have been of necessity, and I approved of them wholeheartedly. Some have been occasioned by their plan to keep the Dome in place over Chester's Mill for months instead of little more than a week, as is the case in the book. Other story modifications are slotting into place because the writers have completely re-imagined the source of the Dome.

That such a re-imagining had to take place was my only serious concern when the series was still in the planning stages, and that concern was purely practical. If the solution to the mystery were the same on TV as in the book, everyone would know it in short order, which would spoil a lot of the fun (besides, plenty of readers didn't like my solution, anyway). By the same token, it would spoil things if you guys knew the arcs of the characters in advance. Some who die in the book—Angie, for instance—live in the TV version of Chester's Mill…at least for a while. And some who live in the book may not be as lucky during the run of the show. Just sayin'.

Listen, I've always been a situational writer. My idea of what to do with a plot is to shoot it before it can breed. It's true that when I start a story, I usually have a general idea of where it's going to finish up, but in many cases I end up in a different place entirely (for instance, I fully expected Ben Mears to die at the end of 'Salem's Lot, and Susannah Dean was supposed to pop off at the end of Song of Susannah). "The book is the boss," Alfred Bester used to say, and what that means to me is the situation is the boss. If you play fair with the characters—and let them play their parts according to their strengths and weaknesses—you can never go wrong. It's impossible.

There's only one element of my novel that absolutely had to be the same in the novel and the show, and that's the Dome itself. It's best to think of that novel and what you're seeing week-to-week on CBS as a case of fraternal twins. Both started in the same creative womb, but you will be able to tell them apart. Or, if you're of a sci-fi bent, think of them as alternate versions of the same reality.

As for me, I'm enjoying the chance to watch that alternate reality play out; I still think there's no place like Dome.

As for you, Constant Reader, feel free to take the original down from your bookshelf anytime you want. Nothing between the covers has changed a bit.

Stephen King
June 27th, 2013

http://www.stephenking.com/promo/utd_on_tv/letter.html

 

Thanks for posting a typically generous, genial response from one of our least egotistical major artists.

What I'd like to know (from a distance, not sure I'd want to actually know them) is - who are these readers who are "miffed" (not a word I use a lot) about the differences between book and show.

First, much as I love Stephen King ( and he is, really, one of my personal culture heroes), we're not exactly talking Tolstoy here. The guy writes great popular fiction. At his very, very best he approaches the territory in which deathless prose resides but....

Second, we're talking "Under the Dome" - an exceedingly minor chapter in King's life work. It covers themes he's expressed before and ends almost as absurdly as " The Langoliers." (And while I loved "The Langoliers", in both its prose and video forms, It qualifies as the guiltiest of pleasures.) So more power to the people behind "Under the Dome" - they can't possibly make it any less plausible. To those who are "miffed" at the changes -I'm afraid you might have some bigger problems of which you may be unaware.