Summer TV season goes Under the Dome
Series based on novel by Stephen King
WILMINGTON, N.C. — The first time Under the Dome’s writer and executive producer Brian K. Vaughan met Stephen King to discuss adapting the master novelist’s 2009 dystopian tome for network television, the horror kingpin gave his instructions by way of another pop culture monarch.
“From our first meeting he told us, to quote Elvis, ‘It’s your baby, you rock it now,’” Vaughan, who wrote the pilot and is the CBS miniseries’ executive producer, alongside fellow former Lost veteran Jack Bender and E.R. scribe Neal Baer, recalled during a recent interview in the North Carolina’s Screen Gems studios, where the series is shot.
Set to debut Monday night on CBS and Global Television in Canada, Under the Dome maintains the same sociology experiment concept of King’s novel — which tells the story of how residents of a small American town cope with the sudden and mysterious appearance of a transparent dome around their city — but Vaughan, Baer and Bender have gone to great lengths to make sure the highproduction series (each of the 13 episodes costs in the range of $3.5 million) is bigger, bolder and more viscerally immense than its source material.
It also, Baer noted, has a very different ending than the original novel. “Not that you’ll see it this season,” he laughed.
For King, who serves as producer along with another famous Steven (that’d be Spielberg) and gets script and casting approval, Vaughan and company’s interpretation of Under the Dome was a welcome change from some previous, occasionally cringeworthy, adaptations of his work.
“A lot of times, network TV isn’t notable for bravery,” King explained, citing both his own network series and that of procedurals such as Criminal Minds.
Sitting in the series’ set diner, formerly home to the bedroom of Dawson’s Creek’s titular protagonist, the 65-year-old recounted Under the Dome’s origin at the dawn of environmental social consciousness.
“I had the idea for Dome while I was teaching school in ’72. This was about two years before I wrote Carrie,” he said, referring to his breakout novel. “It was around the time OPEC (the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries) began realizing that they could charge more than 11 cents per barrel and people started caring about global warming. But I just didn’t have the resources at that time, I had no time and no money and I couldn’t do the research. I got about 75 pages then.”
King would try to revisit the concept once again in 1982 with his unfinished novel The Cannibals, but that, too, never saw the light of day. (In a screening of the pilot at Wilmington’s Thalian Hall later that night, King would note that he hopes the cannibalism concept comes into play in the television series).
It would take the rise of “political frat boy” George W. Bush to eventually lead King to flesh out his original concept into Under the Dome. Stuck on a long flight to Melbourne and fearful of Bush’s policies, the novelist said he pondered, “We live on this little blue planet, this is what we have right here. We live under a dome that’s an atmosphere and the resources that we got are the resources that we got,” he recalled. “I thought, ‘What if you took this town and you made it a microcosm of what’s going on — you have this leader who is not that bright but the guy who is second in command is the guy who makes all the decisions, he’s the iron fist inside the velvet glove. It’s the perfect position because you’ve got deniability.”
For the television event, a gamble on CBS’s behalf in the hopes of changing the landscape of reality-heavy summer network television, Vaughan, Bender and Baer chose to detach the series from its political axis, even taking out the town’s Bush-esque councilmen, and refining the concept.
“We had many a discussion in the writer’s room about our political theory courses as undergraduates; about Hobbes and Hume and Rousseau,” Baer said, nodding as well to both Lord of the Flies and Bender and Vaughan’s previous, philosophy-heavy, series Lost. “We’re also very interested in Sartre: ‘What is hell but living with other people?”
“The idea is still the same,” King noted. “What if you have somebody in power that’s making bad decisions and you can’t get out? What if you have (diminishing) resources — propane, gasoline, medicine, water? So it was basically that idea and taking those characters and running with them.”
Dean Norris, who plays car salesman, town councilman and the series’ designated bad guy James “Big Jim” Rennie, cites another philosopher, Nietzsche, as inspiration.
In the book, Big Jim is the Dick Cheney-esque Machiavellian behind the power, however Norris argued that in this incarnation, he is stripped of his political leanings. “Bill Clinton could be just as hungry for power as Cheney,” the Harvard graduate said with a toothy grin.
For Montreal-born Rachelle LeFevre, “The Dome is our horror; the horror without reveals the horror within.”
The red-headed Twilight vet plays a reporter who takes in the series’ mysterious hero Dale “Barbie” Barbara (Mike Vogel) in Under the Dome’s fictional town of Chester’s Mill. The pilot also sets up the flawed relationship between Big Jim and his son, Junior (Alexander Koch) — who happens to be holding his girlfriend (Britt Robertson) hostage in the family’s fallout bunker.
“Our show isn’t just one kind of show: It has the science fiction element, it has the mystery element, and it does have an epic (quality) — they’ve really worked hard to make it like a mini-movie each week,” LeFevre explained. “There’s something each week that will keep you hanging on and it’s also a really good characterdriven show.”
Echoing her statement, King warns that while Under the Dome’s philosophical concept and socially conscious rhetoric may sound heavy, the final product is still meant to be entertainment.
“Obviously, based on the things that have been on the American press lately, there is a (real life) dome and it involves your cellphone,” he said.
“But this is not a politically charged story here. It’s not an allegory.”