Stephen King didn't call his novel The Virus. He didn't call it The Disease or The End of the World As We Know It or anything that nihilistic. He wanted his 1978 book about a global pandemic that takes all but a fraction of human life with it to be called The Stand. When there are no rules, his thinking went, survivors have to make a choice: Do you go full Darwin and indulge dark, selfish instincts or do what's right for the sake of others? "I wanted to write about bravery," says King. "At some point, people do have to make a stand."

The novel remains one of the author's greatest achievements, and a new limited series adaptation—the first since 1994—is headed to CBS All Access later this year in the shadow of an actual global pandemic. Showrunners Benjamin Cavell and Taylor Elmore, who first worked together on Justified, are quick to point out that King layered in reassuring themes along with the terrifying ones. "It's about the fundamental questions of what society owes the individual and what we owe to each other," says Cavell.

"I WANTED TO WRITE ABOUT BRAVERY. AT SOME POINT, PEOPLE DO HAVE TO MAKE A STAND." — STEPHEN KING

It's hard to know what our world will feel like when The Stand begins its nine-episode run, but the coronavirus pandemic has only intensified interest in movies like Contagion and Outbreak. The show had to wrap production four days early in March when COVID-19 began to shut America down, but, as of this writing, the plan is to proceed with the release as scheduled. "It was very surreal, obviously, to start to realize that there was a creeping pandemic the way there was at the beginning of our show," Cavell says.

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Despite parallels that fans have drawn, the disease in The Stand is catastrophically worse than anything we've seen in real life, killing more than 99 percent of the population. Survivors who are drawn to decency unite around Mother Abagail (played by Whoopi Goldberg), who, over the course of her 108 years, has endured the worst the world has to offer and kept her strength and empathy intact. Her sinister counterpart is a charismatic rockabilly demon named Randall Flagg (Alexander Skarsgard). In the ashes of the old world, the new tribes head for a clash that could fulfill the prophecy of Armageddon.

"First there's chaos, and then there's reintegration," says King. "So it's a question of, do things reintegrate in a way that's good, or do they reintegrate in a way that's Hitlerian and bad? It could go either way, so I wanted to write about that. I wanted to put those two forces in conflict."

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Among the vast cast of characters is Frannie Goldsmith (Odessa Young), who discovers she is pregnant just as the disease takes hold. She is immune to the virus, but will her child be too? Frannie carries the literal answer to whether life will go on. "We do focus very much on that story of Fran and the baby," says Elmore. "What are a modern woman's motivations in this position, a 20-year-old kid who is pregnant when the world ends? She's a formidable force in this story."

Over his long career, King has made us confront some horrific imaginings. But for every shape-shifting killer clown or crazed father in a desolate hotel, he has also modeled optimism and decency. King wrote the final episode of the series himself, adding a coda to his original story that offers hope for some key characters. "Over the last however many years, we have sort of taken for granted the structure of democracy," says Cavell. "Now, so much of that is being ripped down to the studs. It's interesting to see a story about people who are rebuilding it from the ground up."