TELEVISION: Slouching Towards Vegas

Like the vampires, ghouls, rabid dogs and other monsters that populate his fiction, Stephen King seems practically unstoppable. New novels appear with almost supernatural speed, take a choke hold on the best-seller lists, and are transformed into movies that typically make a quick blitz at the box office before settling into a long, lucrative life on the video shelves. For an impressive array of filmmakers, from Brian De Palma to Rob Reiner, King has made an ideal collaborator: he provides the sprawling, imaginative raw material; they bring the cinematic compression and sometimes (as in Stanley Kubrick's The Shining) the resonance of art.

Television, however, handles King clumsily. ABC's four-hour version of It (childhood friends battle nameless evil, personified by Tim Curry as a malevolent clown) was bloated and out of control, while The Tommyknockers (more nameless evil, this time chasing Jimmy Smits) seemed derivative and halfhearted. Still, both were big hits in the ratings. At a time when TV is awash in docudramas and uplifting moral tales, King's dark, fanciful (though still moralistic) stories seem liberating.

The Stand, airing on ABC next week, is the biggest TV serving of King yet. Based on his 800-page 1978 novel (to which the author restored 400 previously cut pages in 1990), it spans four nights and eight hours and portrays nothing less than the end of the world as we know it. King's horrors, as usual, are firmly rooted in the everyday. The opening scene sets the tone. At a government lab nestled in a quiet California desert community, a security guard gets a panicked alarm: the containment of a deadly experimental virus has been breached. Instead of triggering the security system, the guard races across the manicured lawns, grabs his wife and baby and bolts off in a car before the area can be quarantined.

He is the unwitting carrier of a germ that causes flulike symptoms and sudden, grisly death in almost everyone who comes in contact with it. A simple cough and sniffle are the homely signs of doom. In a series of short, effective scenes that hopscotch around the country -- a small town in East Texas, a disease-control lab in Vermont, the streets of New York City -- the plague spreads, causing death, panic, chaos. Practically all that remains of civilization is talk-radio etiquette. A radio host (Kathy Bates), enraged about the "superflu" cover-up, takes calls from panicked listeners who tell of dying babies and mass body burnings. Says one caller: "First of all ((cough)), I just want to tell you that I love your show . . . "

The first two hours of The Stand, which Mick Garris directed from a screenplay by King, are as gripping as anything in recent TV memory. But after the cities have been cleaned out, the mini-series mutates into a more tepid apocalyptic soap opera. The narrative coalesces around a few disparate survivors (who have an unexplained immunity to the flu), among them an easygoing Texan (Gary Sinise), a pregnant young woman from Maine (Molly Ringwald), a rock singer (Adam Storke) and an angelic deaf-mute (Rob Lowe). The few people left are mystically drawn into two camps: one led by a messiah- like black woman (Ruby Dee), the other by a satanic "dark man" (a leonine Jamey Sheridan).