Stephen King is undoubtedly one of the most adapted living authors, and likely the dead ones, too. Every year seems to bring another crop of takes on the horror maestro’s work, and 2025 is shaping up to be no exception, with film adaptations of The Long Walk and The Running Man (both written under his pseudonym Richard Bachman) due in the coming months. Back in June, it was announced that his post-apocalyptic epic The Stand would be adapted for a third time, this time from director Doug Liman.

Now couldn’t be a better time to deliver a more faithful adaptation of one of his recent(ish) works: 2009’s Under the Dome. The TV series, which aired for three seasons on CBS from 2013-2015, took the story in a much different, sci-fi direction, sanding off some of the darkness in the process. With the glut of new King adaptations showing no signs of slowing, Under the Dome’s distressingly timely themes would make it an ideal property to tackle next.

‘Under the Dome’ Was Unintentionally Timely

King had the idea for Under the Dome since the mid-’70s, but felt he was too young to tackle the story’s epic scope and sprawling cast of characters at that time. Still, he never gave up on it, even as it mutated into different forms over the decades. The novel has always been something of a political allegory, with King claiming it was meant to satirize the George W. Bush administration along with its clear environmental message, but it’s become even more timely in the intervening years.

Under the Dome follows the residents of Chester’s Mill, a small Maine (where else?) town that finds itself suddenly enclosed by an impenetrable, transparent barrier. Very little outside air can get in or out, leaving the atmosphere to grow increasingly hotter and harder to breathe as the town’s generators and wood stoves pollute the air. King illustrates how seemingly decent people can be manipulated during a crisis, as Chester’s Mill’s residents fall under the control of Big Jim Rennie, a used car salesman and the town’s tyrannical second selectman.

Taking place over just a handful of days, Big Jim increases his hold on the town, filling the police force with loyal thugs and stoking fear and violence in order to gain further control. He pins the blame on Dale Barbara, an Army vet who recently moved to town, who is deputized by the president to take over. While King could never have known when he wrote it, it’s not hard to see how the Chester’s Mill of 2009 predicted the America of 2025, where a demagogue increasingly consolidates his power, using fear of outsiders to stoke division and intimidating his critics into silence, all while the air itself becomes hostile.

What a Proper ‘Under the Dome’ Adaptation Could Look Like

The Under the Dome TV series started out reasonably faithful, with some characters altered or combined and the book’s plot somewhat remixed, but it became increasingly distant from the source material as it went on, and its reception from fans quickly deteriorated. King’s novel does have a sci-fi component (when it’s revealed who put the dome in place), but the series takes this much further, introducing the concept of The Kinship, an alien organization that has the power to possess human bodies in a sort of Borg-esque hive mind. While this idea is interesting in its own way, it’s far from the relatively straightforward story of the original.

Part of this undoubtedly comes down to the fact that it was on network TV, meaning the depths the book goes to would likely be too dark for primetime. Some of the casting was solid, particularly Dean Norris as Big Jim, but it felt like an attempt at replicating the mystery-box storytelling of something like Lost rather than tackling the book’s unsettling treatise on human nature more directly.

For a new adaptation to work, it should retain the scope of the novel, as well as its darker elements. It would work well as a limited series on a prestige network or streaming service, where it could have the room to tell a complete story while remaining self-contained. HBO’s upcoming It: Welcome to Derry will prove whether King’s storytelling can thrive in an episodic format (though Hulu’s King-remix series Castle Rock already showed it could), and if it proves successful, Under the Dome could be a perfect follow-up.

King miniseries don’t have the greatest track record, with some of the early ones feeling pretty dated and corny (also due in part to airing on network TV), while Paramount+’s attempt at The Stand from 2020 largely failed to please newcomers or diehard fans. At nearly 1,100 pages, Under the Dome certainly has sprawl, but the plot is relatively tight and very propulsive, rarely letting up from its first pages. The Stand is a difficult book to adapt, with its lengthy passages of characters traveling from one place to another, but Under the Dome has the potential to succeed where other miniseries have struggled.

A new adaptation of Under the Dome would likely have to downplay any parallels to the present day, with every studio afraid to raise the ire of the current administration, but its timeliness is unavoidable. Recent filmmakers seem to have cracked the code on adapting King’s work, delivering some really solid adaptations like 2017’s IT and this year’s The Life of Chuck and The Monkey. If we can have a third attempt at The Stand, why not take another run at Under the Dome?