Later this year, Spike will begin airing a television series based on the Stephen King novella The Mist, which Frank Darabont previously turned into a feature film back in 2007. All along, many fans have been assuming that the series, or at least the 10 episode first season of it, would basically be an expansion of the story told in the novella and the film:
After a mysterious mist envelops a small New England town, a group of locals trapped in a supermarket must battle a siege of otherworldy creatures… and the fears that threaten to tear them apart.
During the Television Critics Association's winter previews, it was revealed that this first season will not be set within the confines of a supermarket. Rather, the series will check in with multiple groups of people in different locations that are shrouded in the mist.
Alyssa Sutherland will play a mother who gets trapped in a mall with her daughter and her daughter's rapist; Morgan Spector will play the father of Sutherland's daughter who is stuck in a different location from the rest of his family; Okezie Morro will play a man with amnesia struggling to find allies; and Frances Conroy will play a woman whose ideas regarding the origin of the monstrous mist will lead to great conflict within her small community of survivors.
Executive producer Christian Torpe describes The Mist as a character-driven show in which "the mist is, to a certain degree, an existential backdrop and the story is more about how people react to fear and to the threat of what's out there." He also says the series is "like a weird, twisted cousin to the original source material. Fans of the movie and of the book and Mr. King's work will certainly see elements from it, and especially if you watch the season in macro perspective there’s plenty of parallel. We also, in order to develop it for TV and to turn it into an ongoing series, took our own little detours here and there. Let's call it a parallel story or a cousin to the original one."
When asked what he thought of the film's controversial ending, which was very different from the way King finished the novella, Torpe replied, "I personally love Mr. Darabont's ending. I thought it was a stroke of genius. We are playing around in that territory and we also know, of course, Mr. King's ending. And I know Mr. King actually preferred Darabont's ending, and so I think we came up with our own spin on a very original and surprising ending."
The Mist's "weird, twisted cousin" will be on Spike by the end of 2017.