Under the Dome: Season 1

The town of Chester's Mill is sealed off from the rest of the world by an invisible dome. The inhabitants - and various visitors - have to manage dwindling supplies and social disorder whilst trying to figure out how to escape.

We live in a golden age of television, with TV shows pushing further in crafting excellent narratives and creating compelling characters out of even the most mundane of situations. Rising budgets and production values mean that TV shows now often look like movies, sometimes with big movie stars opting for the less-lucrative but more creatively and artistically rewarding opportunities to slowly explore and develop characters over hours and maybe years. It's a great time to be a TV fan.

Under the Dome therefore stands as a stark warning that we should not be complacent or overconfident that this is a state that will last forever. Under the Dome is a horrible show, so terrible that on a fundamental level all involved with it must know how bad it is, and therefore can only have made it deliberately as a warning to others to stay on the ball and avoid this show's pitfalls.

Under the Dome is based on Stephen King's quite excruciatingly awful novel of the same name, but in a move that is actually impressive, is awful for completely different reasons. The primary weaknesses of King's novel - the ludicrous implausibility at how quickly everything disintegrates and its unhealthy obsession with raping Twilight fans (seriously Stephen, we know you're a Harry Potter fan but that's just juvenile) - are fortunately missing from the TV show. Brian K. Vaughan - the man credited with saving Lost from a dip in form during its early third season - has great credentials and is a good enough writer to know what to change from the book (i.e. almost everything apart from the dome itself and a few character names) to make it work on TV. But pretty much none of it does work.

The biggest problem is the total lack of decent, compelling characters. Our main lead appears to be Dale 'Barbie' Barbara, but he is a rather unsympathetic killer and thug. Actor Mike Vogel initially gives it his all, but after a couple of episodes seems to realise that the inexplicable lurches in his character's motivations aren't going away and decides to sleep-walk through the rest of the series. Rachelle Lefevre also gamely engages with her character of Julia before realising she doesn't have a character, just a cliche (unconventional journalist from out of town with totally amazing hair), and likewise phones it in. The young kids are more enthusiastic and get some credit for being the only people in town actually bothered about what the dome is and where it came from, but their lack of experience and some poor direction results in them lurching from painfully over-acting to massively underselling big moments.

There are some good points in the cast. Natalie Martinez's character of Linda has some bizarre character turns and is rather gullible at times, but she at least just about manages to sell the idea of a character cracking up from the stress of the situation (whether that was the aim or not). Dean Norris also brings some much-needed charisma to the antagonistic role of 'Big Jim' Rennie, even if some of his quite astonishing lines are delivered through teeth hugely gritted as he tries to forget he went from filming Breaking Bad to this mess (a drop in quality only comparable to Natalie Portman appearing in Black Swan and then Your Highness). However, the good work of others is undone by Alexander Koch as Junior. His utter lack of acting talent and the way he seems to have only three stand-by expressions he moves between, sometimes randomly, is almost hypnotic. It's certainly the worst performance by a regular in a TV series that I've seen in many, many years.

The writing is also awful. Brian K. Vaughan has some seriously good work to his name, but he seems unable to employ it here. Dialogue is expositionary, unconvincing and wooden in the extreme. You can predict how entire scenes will go - sometimes down to lines - from their opening moments. The show also starts back-pedalling from its premise - a bunch of people trapped together in a dome - immediately by periodically bringing in new characters and unconvincingly explaining they've been in hiding since the dome came down. When the writing doesn't even have the courage to deal with the basic premise of the show, there's a huge problem.

Under the Dome's first season (*½) is almost irredeemably bad. The writing is almost completely bad, the acting is mostly bad, very little about it (from character motivations to the supply situation to the utter lack of contact with the outside world after the third or fourth episode) makes any kind of sense and the whole thing feels like a big, dead, inert weight. A few flashes of competence from a couple of the actors are the only thing that makes watching it even remotely bearable. Still, it's a vast improvement on the novel.

Under the Dome by Stephen King

On October 21st, the town of Chester's Mill in Maine is abruptly sealed off from the outside world by a mysterious barrier. Several cars and aircraft crash into the 'Dome', causing serious injuries and several fatalities. The US government moves swiftly to seal off the area and attempt to pierce the Dome through technological means. However, inside the Dome events rapidly deteriorate as a local town politician takes advantage of the chaos to try to take over the town, sparking a chain of events that will end in tragedy.


Originally published in 2009, Under the Dome was notable for several reasons at release. It was King's first really big, one-off horror novel in a considerable number of years. It was also a book that King had been trying to write on and off since 1976, but had bounced off as it was 'too ambitious'. From the writer of the complex Dark Tower sequence and the large, sprawling The Stand, this was an impressive comment. After reading the finished novel, it's also a somewhat baffling comment, as it's a pretty straightforward book.

What we have here is Lord of the Flies retold in a modern American small town sealed off by a weird forcefield. The novel unfolds over four days, during which law and order inside the Dome completely break down, leading to total anarchy. There are numerous deaths, some right-on cultural references that will be dated in a year and some highly implausible plot twists before events resolve in an ending so anti-climactic I seriously wondered if my copy of the book was missing its final pages. King has a reputation for delivering poor endings, but even by his standards this one is disappointing.

Of course, King usually gets away with poor endings by making the journey so unforgettably good (The Stand being a primary case in point). This is not the case with Under the Dome, where the journey is remarkably predictable. Within minutes of meeting each character, the reader can easily sort them into 'good' and 'bad' categories and make a guess as to what role they will play in the inevitable conflict. We have the small-town politician who instantly turns into Stalin the second he thinks he can get away with it, the heroic Iraq War veteran who is out to save the town (aided by his plucky female newspaper editor sidekick), the genius computer-programmer whizkid and a pretty standard ensemble of drunks, nutcases and occasional normal people thrust into a situation out of their control. It would be fairer to call them caricatures rather than characters, actually.


Still, nuanced characterisation is not why you read a big Stephen King horror novel. What you read one of these for is for the premise, the pacing and the scares. In which case you're also in big trouble with Under the Dome. The premise is fairly solid, although once you take away the actual Dome itself you're left with a very standard 'people stuck living together in close confinement' scenario. The variations brought about by the specifics of the Dome (most notably the fact that people can look in from the outside and see the horrors unfolding but unable to intervene) are left chronically under-explored. The pacing is arguably more successful: though 900 pages long, the novel does truck along at a fairly relentless pace, with frequent cliffhangers and plot twists of varying degrees of effectiveness. A slightly cheesy device is that King will end a chapter on a cliffhanger related to something going on across town (usually the sound of gunshots) and then we rewind to see what's actually happened from another POV.

As for the scares, they're pretty much non-existent this time around. There are no monsters tearing up the town, so the book has to rely on the psychological terror unleashed by both the idea of being trapped inside the Dome (which given the Dome is seven miles wide and contains a fully-functioning modern American town with fairly substantial supplies, is not exactly a major hardship) and by the activities of our antagonist, Big Jim Rennie, and his band of evil cops. The problem with this is that Big Jim Rennie is a ludicrous cartoon character (originating somewhere between Dick Cheney and Stalin) who never convinces as a serious character, his insane, necrophiliac and serial-killing son even less so. The bad guys' motivations are totally unfathomable. Since they don't know when the Dome might be lifted, Rennie's power-grab is pointless and seriously risky for himself (which, given the lengths he has gone to to protect his reputation prior to the novel starting, is implausible). King could have tweaked the narrative by perhaps having Rennie responsible for the Dome, which would have made a lot more sense, but as published Rennie's activities are ridiculously unconvincing.

All of this could have been borne as a sort of insane comedy of errors with a masochistic streak (not to mention writing that is often so bad it's unintentionally hilarious) if King didn't tiresomely decide to tread down the obvious path of terrorising his female characters with the threat of sexual assault, and in one scene actually carry it out with a somewhat disturbingly-detailed gang rape scene (which leads to madness, murder and suicide). This scene gains some added WTFness when one of the attackers berates the victim for being a Twilight fan rather than a Harry Potter fan like himself (and of course it is well known that King is a massive Rowling fan and loathes Meyer). If you're going to use sexual assault as a plot point in your novel, a certain level of responsibility to treat it seriously comes attached to it. Here King uses it simply to show how cartoonishly evil his villains are and possibly even as a source of comedy (with the Rowling/Meyer stuff), which is simply unacceptable.

Under the Dome (*) is a remarkably weak novel, almost pornographic in its lingering descriptions of murders, violence and sexual assault and feeble in its attempts to give a decent sense of resolution. Here and there King's old form is visible through the reasonable pacing and at least one brief scene between a prisoner in the Dome and a soldier watching helplessly from outside that shows how badly the premise has been squandered. But overall, a colossal letdown from one of the biggest names in the business.