At first glance, Carrie, Mike Flanagan’s new Amazon Prime adaptation of Stephen King’s debut novel, seems like the worst that streaming platforms offer. It opens, as so many of these shows do, on the series’ climax in that “We’re worried that if you aren’t hooked in the first 5 minutes, you’ll turn this off” way that Netflix invented and Prime bastardized. But not only are we pretty much all already familiar with the iconography of Carrie White (played in the series by breakout actress Summer H. Howell) covered in pig’s blood on stage at her school’s prom, but King himself does that very thing in his book, referencing a “great tragedy” to come on the novel’s fifth page.

That tragedy, of course, is that Carrie, after enduring more than her fair share of high school bullying, finally snaps at the senior prom, using her powers of telekinesis to kill everyone inside and burn the place to the ground. The novel is more than 50 years old; there have been three film adaptations (1976, 2002, 2013 — plus one sequel), and there was even a Broadway musical in the ’80s. We know this. Do we really need another version of Carrie? While the series takes a very long time to justify its existence, it eventually makes a fairly compelling case.

The show takes eight episodes to tell a story that took King less than 200 pages and Brian De Palma less than 100 minutes in his ’76 adaptation. That, too, feels like the “We want you to spend as much time on our platform as possible” ploy that plagues so many streaming television shows and documentaries (especially documentaries) now.

Take the show’s first episode, titled, quite fittingly, “First Period,” not only a play on Carrie’s high school schedule (the episode where she blows everything to smithereens is called “AP Physics”), but the episode where Carrie, a high school sophomore, experiences her first menstrual cycle in the girls’ locker room. That scene begins on the first page of King’s novel; De Palma, ever the pervert, puts the film’s opening credits over slow-mo of the high school girls hitting the showers. In the miniseries, it’s the cliffhanger of the first episode — nearly an hour into the show’s runtime. It sure feels like they’re stretching this thing out and milking it for all it’s worth.

But as the show plays out, it’s clear they’ve chosen the right avenues to explore. I was particularly worried, for instance, that they’d spend a ton of time on an explanation of how a teenage girl never got her period. King yada-yadas it and blames it on her telekinesis, and the show…does the same thing. What they do choose to focus on is the other girls’ reactions. Bullying has changed a lot since the ’70s. They’re not just throwing pads and tampons at her anymore; they’re pulling out their cell phones, filming it, and then posting about it on social media.

King used the idea of high school bullying to tell the story he wanted to tell about a girl with telekinesis; Flanagan uses the idea of Carrie to tell the story of high school bullying. All of the same beats are there: the first period, the girls’ punishment, the prom, the explosion, but the eight-episode filler explores what bullying, both in-person and cyber, can do to a young girl. How it can destroy whatever self-worth she already had, how it can destroy your understanding of your own identity, and how it can drive you to do terrible, perhaps even harmful, things. You thought high school was bad, but did you have secret superpowers nobody knew about?

In every other version of the story, Chris Hargensen (a snakey Alison Thornton) is the ultimate bully: relentless, harsh, and cruel. After she loses her prom privileges because of how she treats Carrie, she enacts her revenge with the pig’s blood scheme. Here, with the extra time we get to spend with her, we learn that she’s dealing with her own crap, like her parents’ divorce, her father’s embezzlement crimes, and her family’s soon-to-be bankruptcy. It doesn’t justify her actions, but it does make her less cartoonish. Lashing out is, in many ways, a natural reflex. Sue Snell (Siena Agudong, the show’s standout performance) is caught between the two worlds of her childhood friend’s tormenting and her attempts to be nice to the new girl, and there’s perhaps no more defining a character moment in adolescence than determining the person you want to be by who you choose to associate with.

Anonymous Instagram accounts aren’t the only way the show has been brought to the modern day, with Carrie’s mother (an underutilized Samantha Sloyan — letting her down is the show’s biggest letdown) no longer an unstable religious fanatic, but instead a conspiracy theorist, parent’s rights mommy vlogger, and right-wing whisperer. It’s bad enough to deal with what Carrie has to deal with at school, and I can’t imagine anything worse to have to go home to.

Flanagan, who is credited with writing the first and last episodes as well as directing half the series, has become the go-to interpreter of King’s work over the years, with his movies Gerald’s Game (2017), Doctor Sleep (2019), and The Life of Chuck (2024) doing well enough with audiences and even King himself. He’s done adaptations of Poe and Jackson; he’s got Clayface and Exorcist movies coming up; he’s working to get King’s Dark Tower series out of development hell; and now he’s manifesting his own Jaws and Jurassic Park movies. It’s easy to push him toward something original and bemoan when he chooses not to do so again, but if his bets keep hitting, Hollywood’s gonna keep having him do this. He’ll be the de facto adaptation guy. And he seems just fine with that, even sneaking in some extended universe stuff throughout the series, while threatening us with two more seasons of a show that’s already wrapped every word of the source material.

Flanagan’s Carrie is neither the masterpiece that is De Palma’s Sissy Spacek-starring film (for better or worse, he got it right the first time around), nor is it the disastrous musical that received boos from the balcony during the first preview at the Virginia Theatre on Broadway. It’s pretty squarely in the middle. They’ve told their version of the story, and they’ve told it all. There’s no need for two more seasons — that would be the worst of streaming.

Review Courtesy of Patrick J. Regal

Feature image credit to Prime Video