Highlighting Debbie Mathersons (Catherine Reitman) in the first two episodes was a smart move to cement viewers' sympathy for Nina. Debbie is explicitly presented as having achieved her prestigious position through trickery and blackmail, while Nina achieved hers through hard work, intelligence, and dedication—and…

Then stick around. A later episode will make (half) your dream come true.

You are in for a treat.

Where should we meet to fight about why "Smile Time" didn't make this list?

Thanks for the heads-up! I've corrected the link.

Agreed: If I'd realized I could only easily replace it with the expanded version, I would have taped my original-version paperback together one more time instead of tossing it and buying a new copy. (I like to keep it on hand; perhaps counter-intuitively, I almost always re-read it when I'm stuck home with the flu.)

Sadly, my paean of appreciation for Ray Walston was just one more thing I had to cut. He's great in this: warmly intelligent, earnest without being treacly, and he gives all his scenes a grounded quality that the miniseries generally lacks.

My editor and I discussed which spelling to use: in the novel, she's clearly "Mother Abagail," but since IMDb is traditionally our source for film and television names and spellings, IMDb's spelling ("Abigail") is the one the editor settled on.

My face went through a pretty remarkable series of involuntary expressions when your comment reminded me that The Tommyknockers miniseries exists.

Incidentally, I'm referring to the 1990 expanded novel; I don't have the 1978 original handy*.

Enkidum, you're right about it appearing as a hand in the novel, though not consistently throughout the scene, and not performing the actions of a hand as it's shown in the miniseries. I misspoke about the novel's hand being only figurative, and thank you for the correction. To be frank, it's not clear from reading…

Faith isn't seeing one's beliefs proven; it's believing in the absence of evidence.

Think how well Romero might have plumbed the depths of this story! That's a director who really understands how social friction and plain ol' ego push people to make a terrible situation even worse.

I was so looking forward to rewatching Ossie Davis as the judge, but to my surprise I did find his scenes easy to miss: I felt like his role was even more pared down than the miniseries required. I would happily have traded a half-dozen of Frannie's various smirks and scowls for a few minutes more of Judge Farris's…

Apparently, that cornfield was a source of production problems. The production designer decided to grow his own field of corn to save money, then a storm stunted its growth and (if I've got this straight) he had to go buy corn stalks after all.

Yesssss. That sort of plausible mundane detail enriches the novel throughout: surviving an apocalyptic sickness but nearly dying from an infected scratch, engineers clever enough to get the power plant running but not savvy enough to realize the local population died with their lights and stoves running, organizers…

Incidentally, that guard, Charlie Campion, is played by Ray McKinnon, creator of Rectify.

I had a few nightmares about that tunnel as a child, reading The Stand on a family road trip—which gave me the unpleasant experience of once waking up from a nightmare of that tunnel to find our car was inside a tunnel.

Thanks for pointing that out, gf120581, well-spotted! I just scoured my copy (of the 1990 reprint; my paperback of the original is long since in tatters) and found that line. The text also repeatedly describes it, before and after, as a "ball of electricity" and finally says "The blue ball of fire flung itself into…

I just realized that scene with Joe and the truck takes the show's title, that catchy piece of programmer's jargon, and renders it literal: he halts it. And sets it on fire.