E
think about] is, when he came up
with the concept, he first thought
about, “What if these people were
trapped under this dome for potentially years, how might society change?” [When writing the
book], he was on page 1,200 and
thought, “Oh my God, they’ve only
been trapped under here for a few
days. I better wrap things up.” He
said, “Use television to go to the
places that I couldn’t.” So when I
sat down to write the pilot, it was
just trying to capture the heart
of the book while also having the
freedom to know that we’re allowed to go to different places.
Were there changes between Showtime
and CBS? They’re very different networks
in terms of the audiences they’re pursuing. Were there directives to change
things? Shockingly few. The whole
appeal of doing something like
this was getting to do a darker,
edgier, more adult kind of event
show. And so I was worried when
I heard the Tiffany network was
interested. I thought, “This has
got cows getting cut in half! Maybe this won’t be for them.” But
CBS was really enthusiastic from
the beginning, and said, “We want
to compete with cable. We don’t
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want to cede the summers to
them. We want to do shows that
I have a bit more of an edge.” So
there was very little change from
the Showtime version to CBS.
I think people who don’t read
Stephen King — they just think
of horror and the scares. But there’s
a real, aggressive humanity to his
work. He just loves people so
much, and it really comes through.”
Stephen King has talked about ecological themes and the political allegories he
worked into Under the Dome. Could you
talk a little bit about how those elements
work within the show? Yeah. I hope
that they’re all in there and yet it
will never feel preachy or heavyhanded. Again, one of the reasons
I love Stephen King is because his
stories let you talk about big, challenging concepts, like class structure, like distribution of resources,
like the environment. But you’re
doing it in a really fun, fast-paced,
exciting way — you get to talk
about these ideas without feeling you’re being preachy. If a