TV Watch: Carrie (2026)

Well.  I think this is one of those times you have a bad feeling early on, you choose to ignore it, and realize you ignored your own psychic power telling you from the future that you're going to regret spending almost 8 hours with a show.

Carrie (2026) seems like something everyone loves.  To me, it was one of the dumbest, dullest ends to an eight-hour show I've seen in a long, long time.  It truly sucked.  Bad show.  

Boo, I say.  Boo to your show.

I will be the first to say I've enjoyed the De Palma movie of Carrie since, I believe, high school (I can remember the TV I watched it on, and it's possible it was early college).  Not once have I ever felt what the movie needed was endless lore including a Child's Guide to Witchery, a plot that's kinda just 2026-era third act of Mean Girls inserted and stretched for five hours and taking most of the oxygen from the show.

But, yeah, I guess around episode 3 they showed the witch school or whatever, I realized this was going to be lazy X-Men, and got sad.   The second emo Emaline showed up, I internally groaned (and, oh my god, her deal was so telegraphed it made my head explode).  At the end of the day, Mike Flanagan didn't want to make Carrie because they've tried that in 2002 as a Bryan Fuller project and in 2013 starring Chloe Grace Moretz.  But it sounds like he wants to make a King Universe thing or something.  Which...  kind of exists in the books, I hear, but I ain't got time for that.

The magic of the De Palma movie is that it's such a straight shot from the opening sequence in the showers to the consequences of everyone's actions after humiliating Carrie White.  It's not a revenge story, it's a story about a teenage girl who spends every day is a day in pain due almost entirely to circumstances outside her control.  And then explodes.  

There are messages within the original movie about the cruelty of youth, of the nature of bullies at home and at school.  In this movie, there's a cost in fire and blood.  The point is:  no one survives.  You get a few people with survivor's guilt, but it also consumes Carrie and her mother.  

This movie strips all of that away for a world in which everyone is guilty, but no one is to blame.  Everyone is a victim.  It's lame and it's cowardly.  And it involves a whole bunch of nonsense I have zero interest in following.  I do not care about Mike Flanagan's wife playing Emma Frost with her Hot Topic witches.  

Absolutely terrible.  

The best part was that it had a good amount of Amber Midthunder.  That's always a good idea.

I will say, that's the real crime of the show - the talent here is fantastic.  Summer H. Howell is *phenomenal* as Carrie.  I have no idea how old she is, but she feels like a 15 or 16 year old through the whole series, and while nowhere as fragile as Spacek, she conveys a natural sympathy that reminds me so much of some of my actual classmates in high school it adds a sense of realism to the show that it desperately needs.  And while I rolled my eyes at the Maggie_red stuff a lot, there's no question Samantha Sloyan made Margaret White her own.  Sure, I miss Piper Laurie playing a maniac, but Sloyan was fantastic.

Anyway, I didn't like it.  It didn't feel honest about what it was doing while insisting it was updated for today.  School districts would never handle anything the way its handled in the movie (all of it was opening everyone to law suits and more), and assuming everyone would give a shit and react in only one of two ways to the carrie_red stuff was so clumsy it was kind of embarrassing.  And if that's the story you want to tell, it doesn't need to be Carrie.  And if people *do* think this is how things would be, what a dumb-ass bunch of people we all are.

And, wow, was the final episode an absolute trainwreck.  Absolutely tedious.