The Sci-Fi Channel recently ran all eight hours of Stephen King's The Stand back to back...to back...to back. I wasn't able to watch it at the time, so I recorded it on my DVR.

I recall having watched it back in 1994 when it first aired on ABC, and I enjoyed it at the time. It won a couple of Emmys that year and was nominated for several more, including Outstanding Miniseries. They assembled an impressive cast, including Gary Sinise, Molly Ringworm Ringwald (sorry, old habit), Ruby Dee, Ossie Davis, Rob Lowe, Miguel Ferrer, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar (!), and even Stephen King himself.

But despite all that, as I watched the first two-hour episode, the consistent thought going through my mind was how absolutely awful it was. Not only was the acting from the "unknowns" horrible, I was extremely disappointed in the performances by actors whose abilities I greatly respect, including Sinise, Lowe and Ed Harris. On the other hand, Kathy Bates was very good in her brief appearance.

As a layman uneducated in the intricacies and details of producing a movie or a miniseries, I choose to lay the blame at the feet of the director, Mick Garris. There appeared to me to be many, many bad decisions that Garris made, making the acting look even worse than it was. And don't even get me started on the cornfield where various characters went to meet Mother Abigail in their sleep.

I don't know if I'm going to bother to watch the remaining six hours. It's taking up a lot of space on my DVR, so I may take the expedient (and mind-saving) step of just deleting the rest. We'll see.