Robert Falconer/Prime
Only one thing ever happens to Carrie White. It’s the only reason anyone knows her name, and we’ve seen it happen many times.
Prime Video’s adaptation of Stephen King‘s first published novel is the fourth major screen version of Carrie, following Brian De Palma’s seminal 1976 film and a couple of middling 21st century attempts. (Fifth if you count one unforgettable Riverdale production of Carrie: The Musical.) What makes this rendition notable is that it’s the first Prime Video effort from acclaimed and in-demand writer-director Mike Flanagan after he jumped ship at Netflix and signed a deal with the rival streamer.
By now, Flanagan is a well-established creative voice. He’s got a visual style that prefers muted colors and is well suited for modern-day gothic romance, a notorious fondness for monologues, and a steady cast of regular players that can make him feel like the leader of a theater company. Also: He loves Stephen King. Carrie is Flanagan’s fourth time taking on King’s work, following Gerald’s Game, Doctor Sleep, and The Life of Chuck, with a fifth, The Mist, in development.
Depending on where one stands, this fondness for King can be a liability. Flanagan has more than a few King-ian qualities, up to and including the occasional terrible ending that threatens to clothesline everything preceding it. (This will come up again.) Which brings us back to Carrie. On paper, it sounds like a miscalculation — King’s most familiar work handled by his most sympathetic adapter, ballooned in scope to fill an eight-episode series. It’s a project that begins at a disadvantage, having to justify its existence at every turn, for a skeptical audience wondering what can be done that wasn’t already, and really damn well at that.
It turns out the answer is really simple: Just make it all hurt more. Like the novel, Flanagan’s Carrie begins after the fact, as survivors of the most notorious prom night in pop culture appear in documentary footage recounting what they knew, or didn’t know, about poor, bullied Carrie White (Summer H. Howell) and her telekinetic abilities, and if anyone could have seen her burning down the high school gym and half the town coming. From here, Flanagan makes a number of adjustments, some small and successful, a couple large and less so.
7.9
Carrie
Like
- Wonderful cast
- Small changes that add up in great ways
- Tackles modern concerns
Dislike
- One very big bad change
- Too many music cues
- Softens the novel’s mean edge
First, most obvious, and bold: The cast of Carrie (2026) presents as much younger than any previous version of the story, which is to say they look like real high schoolers. Summer H. Howell is tremendous, immediately putting her own stamp on Carrie White as someone you’re not meant to merely pity, but love and feel protective over. (This is very much a show about what it’s like to send your kids off to school in 2026.) Alison Thornton also delivers a praiseworthy performance as mean girl Chris Hargensen, blind to her privilege but not her father’s neglect, both pitiable and so full of self-pity that she resorts to bullying as an outlet.
ALSO READ: The complete guide to fall TV
Character decisions like these give this familiar story a new register to play in, as acts of cruelty both inadvertent and overt make it exceedingly clear that these are, as Sue Snell (Siena Agudong) tells her interviewer, “just kids.” This comes with some adjustments — the novel’s undercurrent of sexual violence is either smoothed over or excised, and the simmering, constant rage that made the novel such an enduring and haunting read is mostly gone. The chain of dominoes that starts with how the show was cast cascades down into tone in a way that surprises: Carrie (2026) is a warm and deeply empathetic interpretation of the material.
Most every version of Carrie is sympathetic to its protagonist, but Flanagan’s is overflowing with affection for her. In another small adjustment with tremendous impact, Carrie and her mother, Margaret (Flanagan veteran Samantha Sloyan), are fundamentalist shut-ins forced to reintegrate with society when Carrie’s father, a construction worker who kept his personal life a secret from his coworkers, dies on the job. Carrie enters the world full of joy, and her mother full of resentment, and their parallel journeys through it soon bend back toward a collision with each other.
The relationship between Carrie and her mother gets the biggest reconsideration in this vision, as Flanagan’s Carrie does the subtle work of establishing how codependent relationships can form between abusive parents possessed of a religious zeal and their confused children, who have to navigate a difficult world and also a tumultuous relationship with the person they believe loves them but in a way that causes distress. It’s the richest vein the assembled writers have tapped in retelling this story, and the one that they probably could have stood to dig into more, as later episodes lean into the culture war power struggle between parents and educators, and explore how fundamentalist control manifests in secular politics.
Most other expansions to the story are made in the service of really sinking the viewer into the lives of these kids, to manifesting a palpable love for all them, even the rotten ones. They deserve better; every kid does. In this, Carrie stops being a King show and starts being a Flanagan one: tracing the petty failures of adults and how kids are warped by them, set on the path toward becoming broken adults. Flanagan’s stories are deeply humane ones, compassionate to the point that he can’t quite summon the nastiness of his literary idol, not even in his own story.
This is the root of Carrie‘s most disastrous and confounding decision, one that is signaled immediately in the premiere and lingers over the entire series. Flanagan’s series reintroduces and develops an idea that every other adaptation of King’s novel has wisely dropped: the suggestion that Carrie White might not be the only telekinetic girl in the world. A considerable portion of the 1976 novel is told post-facto through book and interview excerpts, newspaper clippings, and other ephemera that attempt to divine whether Carrie White and her telekinetic powers were one of one or not. King does eventually answer this question, but it’s not a focus of the work, merely texture. Flanagan, in fits and starts, does focus on this question, and it drags the series down every time it comes up.
This thread leads to a big change that fundamentally alters the nature of the story’s narrative climax, with an ending that confuses more than it clarifies and makes you wonder what kind of story Carrie (2026) actually is. Like every other choice made in this telling, it was made out of love for Carrie White, which makes it sting all the more. Keeping the end of the story more familiar to fans of the original while expounding on the path there would have been safer but tremendously effective, as the show’s warm approach makes you truly dread prom night and what the story’s going to do to these kids: the gradual, mundane ways they were all let down. Unfortunately when you get to the very end of this Carrie, you’ll still be upset on behalf of these kids — just for a very different reason.
Premieres: Wednesday, Oct. 7 on Prime Video
Who’s in it: Summer H. Howell, Samantha Sloyan, Amber Midthunder, Matthew Lillard
Who’s behind it: Mike Flanagan
For fans of: Midnight Mass, Stephen King
How many episodes we watched: 8 of 8