Good old-fashioned scares in small town
“It’s coming! It’s coming,” screams the disoriented military vet, and boy is it ever.
Stephen King’s 1980 novella, “The Mist,” already served as the basis for a 2007 feature film, written by Frank Darabont (“The Walking Dead”). Now it becomes a dramatic series on Spike TV, premiering on Thursday, June 22.
The 10-episode first season is perfect summer viewing, which is to say there are plenty of escapist thrills, but, at least based on the one episode made available for review, it’s not going to push anyone over the edge.
This is the story of a small town, of course — one of King’s preferred settings, because small towns make good micro-
cosms and because small minds and prejudice seem to thrive in small towns, at least in literature. Such is the case with the bucolic Bridgeville, Maine, where the school board has decreed that students may learn a few things in sex ed, but not too much because, you know, it will give them ideas.
Eve Copeland (Alyssa Sutherland) is already an outcast in the town because of her wild past, and now she is pressing the school board to open their minds to the information teenagers need about sex.
She’s also obsessed with making sure her own 16-year-old daughter, Alex (Gus Birney) doesn’t grow up too fast. Alex’s dad, Kevin (Morgan Spector), is more lenient, especially when Alex wants to go to a party because her current crush, football star Jay Heisel (Luke Cosgrove), will be there.
Alex is convinced the party will be dangerous for her daughter, but there’s something else far more dangerous going on in the woods and mountains surrounding the town.
A homeless military vet with amnesia named Bryan Hunt (Okezie Morro) has experienced it firsthand and rushes into town to warn everyone, only to be thrown in jail as a nutcase.
You’ve seen enough horror movies to know that the townsfolk should have heeded Hunt’s warning. A thick mist descends from the mountains, winds through the woods and invades the town, bringing all sorts of creatures, both seen and unseen, and all predatory.
Writer Christian Torpe does a competent job balancing the need to establish the setting, themes and characters of the series in the pilot episode without too much condensing or overcrowding, but, still, the first episode would have benefited from a little more time to build the suspense properly.
Torpe tries mightily to make the story feel more contemporary by tossing in cell phones and the Internet, as well as a gender-fluid classmate of Alex’s named Adrian (Russell Posner), who is credibly even more of a pariah in town than the Copelands.
But the show still feels dated. A small-town school board could be blind to the reality of teenagers having sex in 2017, but would a high school girl be called a slut and have the word “whore” painted on the street in front of her house after accusing a popular classmate of rape? It is possible, of course, but Torpe’s script doesn’t convince us.
The performances are quite good, especially Frances Conroy as Nathalie Raven, whose attunement to the vagaries of nature makes her more concerned about the sudden arrival of an army of hungry toads than her closedminded neighbors. Spector, Birney and Russell are also quite good, but Sutherland is a little off, perhaps because her character is fundamentally conflicted.
The gore is effective without ever hitting the level of a featurefilm bloodbath. But what will determine whether “The Mist” is the summer hit it aspires to be isn’t the gore: It’s the effectiveness of the psychological terror. It is moderately successful in the first episode, at least.
David Wiegand is an assistant managing editor and the TV critic of The San Francisco Chronicle. Follow him on Facebook. Email: dwiegand@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @WaitWhat_TV