Stephen King Had One Condition To Allow The Mist TV Series

At some point in the future, the number of Stephen King adaptations on screen will outpace the number of stories the horror master has written for the page. Hollywood is always hungry for new and old King tales alike, and has rarely slowed its adaptation machine down in the nearly 50 years since "Carrie" first hit theaters.

At a certain point, it became clear that King, who's only produced a handful of adaptations based on his own work, would have to cede control of his considerable source material and let each new interpretation do its own thing. Still, he's famously made his (usually fairly positive, Stanley Kubrick's "The Shining" aside) opinions on the adaptations known over the years, and always seems interested in the ways filmmakers distinguish their version of the story from his. Several King movies and shows by now feel like unique properties in their own right, with Osgood Perkins' deeply personal and sickly hilarious take on the short story "The Monkey" being one great recent example. Hence, when Danish filmmaker Christian Torpe approached King with an idea for a TV version of his 1980 novella "The Mist," King made his hopes for the series clear (per Inverse): don't let it be "ordinary."

Unlike plenty of other King properties (save us, Mike Flanagan's "Dark Tower" series), "The Mist" already had a very good adaptation on the record by the time Torpe began dreaming up a TV version in the 2010s. Future "The Walking Dead" TV show mastermind Frank Darabont directed and wrote a 2007 movie iteration of the story, which starred Thomas Jane as a father who gets trapped in a grocery store — along with his son and several intense strangers — when a creature-filled mist descends on his Maine town. The movie is known for its great cast (Andre Braugher and Marcia Gay Harden also starred), its frank take on religious zealotry and societal collapse, and its unbearably gut-wrenching ending. The TV show, which only aired for a single season on Spike TV, put a new spin on the story, reimagining characters and adding new locations and mysteries.

"I sat down in a very early stage and wrote an email to Mr. King about what I proposed to do in order to turn it into a full show," Torpe explained in an interview with Inverse in 2017. "We took the heart of his novella, which worries about what people do when they're blinded by fear," the filmmaker continued, calling the book "incredible." He added: "I thought that was, unfortunately, incredibly timely and relevant to tell a story about." According to Torpe, King responded with just one request: "As long as I didn't do anything ordinary he was completely on board and I had his full support."

Torpe called King's blessing "incredibly generous and liberating," and used the source material as a jumping off point for a story about "radicalization in all aspects of life," from religion to politics to identity. The version of "The Mist" we ended up with lasted just 10 episodes, with The Hollywood Reporter noting in 2017 that it fell victim to the Paramount Network rebrand and apparently didn't sustain the ratings needed to be included on the new channel. Instead, a little show known as "Yellowstone" got picked up, leaving the small screen version of "The Mist" as just another short chapter in the big book of Stephen King adaptations.

If you want to decide for yourself whether or not the show is more than ordinary, you can watch all episodes of "The Mist" on PVOD via platforms like Apple TV and Amazon now.