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Stephen King’s ‘The Mist’ Officially Gets A TV Series Order

By Nick Younker
Published on: 07:37 PST, Apr 14, 2016

Stephen King will see another one of his novels adapted for the small screen. Spike TV has officially picked up an entire season of The Mist from Stephen King, which follows a pilot order and pitch that seemed to make the stars align for the project.

Not only did Spike pick up the order for a TV series with King, but they are also fast tracking it for release on their network. According to Deadline, the production schedule will start this summer, and they are trying to get it to air by as early as the start of winter in 2017.

For those who are familiar with TV production schedules and turnaround times, that is quite impressive for a new series.

Although Stephen King has had several adaptations of his hit novels for film and miniseries on TV, he has been quite busy here lately churning out one TV series after another, most of which have been adaptations from his more recent work.

King’s most recent runs on cable, streaming, and broadcast television includes Haven, Under the Dome, 11/22/63, and The Dark Tower, which will be made into a series of films with rumors that there will also be miniseries events on cable TV for the latter.

There is no doubt that Stephen King and Spike are about to go for broke with The Mist, though. The story itself, along with tragic film that followed, has so many different avenues of depth that King himself has gone with that the series could likely make a long run on the network and may even have a The Walking Dead effect on the network, just like TWD did for AMC.

The basic premise to Stephen King’s The Mist is that a military installation near a small seaside town has been experimenting with alternate dimensions. But one of their experiments went wrong, and the creatures from the “other side” came pouring through.

The mist was basically Stephen King’s way of introducing the horror to the town without the people seeing what was coming. The mist itself allowed the insect-like creatures to breach Earth’s current boundaries, and the creatures were kind of like those dreamed up in Japanese giant monster films.

There were giant flying insects that were hungry for meat and liked to use their stingers. There were giant spiders that were so aggressive that they took over an entire pharmacy with relative ease, or so it showed in the movie.

In the film, the main character, played by Thomas Jane, was stuck inside a grocery store with his son and several other patrons of the town. They were forced to stay inside the store and defend themselves from the monstrous insects and tentacled creatures.

But the real meat of the story was not exactly the horror that was happening between the people and the monsters. Rather, it was how people responded to the invasion of the creatures and how they started to turn on each other. There was a major theme that grew out of the people in the grocery store that dealt mainly with religion and a cult-like uprising.

The Mist film was directed by Frank Darabont. He and Stephen King have a had a long-standing relationship with book-to-movie adaptations over the years. Darabont also directed The Shawshank Redemption (Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption) and The Green Mile.

One of the core elements to The Mist was the devastating and tragic ending, which left viewers shocked to the core.

One thing that Stephen King can do with The Mist on Spike is to develop it in such a way that it plays out a lot like The Walking Dead. There will be a supernatural threat and there will also be a human threat. Coincidentally, Darabont also started The Walking Dead on AMC as well.

[Image via Dimension Films/MGM]
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