The Mist on Netflix: Very slow and has the most annoying aspects of horror in it

As someone who had fond memories of a film called The Fog in both the original and the remake in the 2000's, this series caught my eye but I was a bit worried going in about how it was that they were going to stretch a concept that could barely fill a 90 minute film into a 10 episode season. My fears were realized almost immediately as I struggled to get through 2 episodes.

This series is based on a Stephen King story that was only 176 pages long... too short to even be considered a novel (I don't know where that line gets drawn) so it should come as no surprise that this 10 episode, 50 minutes per episode series really drags on, especially after the pilot.

and therein lies the major problem with everything about this series

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In the first episode we are introduced to basically every character that is going to exist throughout the next 10 hours and due to the fact that they had to fill up nearly so much time based on a less-than-200-page book, the story has a TON of filler and useless dialogue that starts to get on your nerves straight away.

There are some cool moments such as a military man who has amnesia that wakes up in the forest not remembering how he got there or even who he is, and he is the first person to display what the mist is all about and shows the audience that it is evil.

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I will admit that I didn't watch the entire series in full beyond the first 2 episodes but from what I have read and can see from scanning the rest and watching the finale, the military guy who we later find out is named Bryan apparently has one of the only interesting character arcs in the entire production.

There are lots of typical filler that takes place, mostly in the dialogue that starts out as funny, but then just becomes annoying and I'll try to sum some of it up here.

• People, who are all completely unfamiliar with what the "mist" is what it does continually ask in a panicky manner things like "what is that?" and "what does that do" or "why is it here?" as if other people in the same situation got there before them and are mist scholars or something.

• Frantic actions taken by certain individuals happen frequently in order to kill off minor characters who barely had any dialogue... these people are obvious "Star Trek Red Shirts" when they appear so you know exactly when and where this is going to happen.

• Before it is determined that the mist is evil (by the people in the show,) people don't seem all that concerned that a really really thick fog, the likes of which could only come from an industrial smoke machine just seems to come out of nowhere. They laugh and say stupid things like "well this is strange," and carry on with what they were doing. I've personally never been attacked by fog or mist, but if a ground level massive cloud is heading my way, I'm probably gonna get out of the way

• People are inexplicably in the middle of the forest during the mist that you can't even see through. How on earth did they even get out there in zero visibility? None of this is explained and when these scenes start, you already know that it is just another excuse to kill someone in a gory fashion

• One group of people are trapped in a shopping mall and unable to get in touch with anyone because the mist knows how to disable cell phone service (this feature didn't exist in the Stephen King novella because mobile phones didn't exist in 1980 and people probably couldn't conceive of the concept back then.... of course the shopping mall has zero land lines.

• People know they are safe if they just stay indoors but even though they one group is trapped in a well-equipped shopping mall, person after person feels compelled to leave.

So all of that are just some of the annoying aspects of this series but the biggest flaw that it has was that it was on network TV to begin with before coming to Netflix (it was on Spike TV) and ANY show that has to stick to a certain number of episodes and certain length per episode is always going to suffer the same fate.

I think there is a very good reason why this show started out strong and then quickly lost nearly all of their network viewers. They struggled to get just a couple hundred thousand viewers per episode after the pilot did well and the 2nd episode seriously disappointed. It was cancelled in the same year that it was introduced and I say, good riddance.

Should I watch it

If it wasn't clear from what I wrote above this show is pretty bad and even though I am starving for a new series I won't set my standards low enough to suffer through this, and I don't think many other people will either.