Mike Flanagan’s Carrie mini-series on Amazon Prime updates Stephen King’s 1974 novel with some modern twists on bullying and fleshes out more of the characters from the book. But ultimately, Carrie suffers from the same problem a lot of franchises have. Instead of focusing on telling one good story, it spends too much time setting up a bigger world, and that hurts both Carrie herself and the story as a whole.
The short version: It’s good, and a bit too long, but it gets in its own way from becoming a classic.
I’m going to spoil the hell out of this further down. I’ll give a clear warning before that, but first, here’s what I can say about the good and the bad without spoilers.
The Spoiler-Free Review
The cast is top notch
Summer H. Howell is amazing as Carrie White, and so is Samantha Sloyan as her mother, Margaret. Matthew Lillard (remember him?) plays Principal Henry Grayle, who’s caught in the middle of the whole situation between students, parents and the community.
A very different setup
The show makes a pretty drastic change to the White family. Ralph White is killed in an accident at a construction site, and his employers had no idea he even had a family. Carrie and her mom are only discovered when police enter the home. Carrie was born in that house and has never left the yard, apart from meeting a next-door neighbor.
Once they’re found, the authorities decide Carrie needs to go to school and Margaret needs to prove she’s a capable provider. Carrie was home-schooled and tests at a sophomore level at 14, so she’s sent straight to high school. All of this is covered pretty quickly in the first episode. Its job is to get Carrie into school and make her an obvious target.
In the novel, Ralph dies when Carrie is much younger, and she’s been in school from the beginning. Book Carrie is also a large girl, and her size and her beliefs make her a target for years. That’s what builds up her hatred of her mother, the other kids and the whole town of Chamberlain.
The show doesn’t make Carrie overweight, but none of the adaptations ever have. Instead, her total isolation from the world plus her age are enough to make her a target. The catch is that the 2026 version seems to take place over a few weeks, or a couple of months at most. Keep that in mind; it matters later.
Bullying, 2026-style
Obviously, in 2026 you can’t have school bullying without phones, videos and social media. Or school shooting drills, for that matter. There’s one on Carrie’s first day, and it’s not a “hide in the corner of the room” drill. It’s a full drill with someone wandering the halls pretending to be a shooter. That would traumatize anyone who didn’t grow up in American schools, and it does a great job of showing just how lost Carrie is.
Of course, the “locker room” incident is here (I’m assuming everyone knows about this). This time, not only are the girls throwing tampons and chanting, they’re recording it all on video.
All of this ends up on social media. An Instagram account called “CarrieRed” is set up to taunt Carrie, but then it grows. Other students find it and start shit-posting about their classmates. Then it reaches the adults in the community, and they start posting about each other.
More time with Carrie and her mother
The series gives us more opportunities to see the dynamic between mother and daughter that we only see glimpses of in the movies.
Plus, Carrie gets a chance to experience the public school system – mainly getting to subjects outside of her mother’s home-schooling. She gets access to computers and an actual library.
On the other side, we get to see more of Margaret. It’s clear that she’s well educated, but after staying at home for more than 15 years, Margaret ends up working for minimum wage. We also get to see that Margaret’s darker side goes beyond bullying her daughter.
More room for the supporting cast
Flanagan does use the series to expand the backstories of the other characters:
- Chris and Sue are best friends instead of rivals, and we learn more about their families. That’s mostly for Chris’s benefit. She comes from a wealthy family that everyone in town knows. Her father runs the construction company where Ralph White was killed, and he’s a bully who uses his money and local influence to push people around. Also, we learn her father has overextended himself, and the delay on his project because of White’s death is catching up with him – and that impacts Chris’ future.
- Chris becomes the primary bully at school, but she’s not focused entirely on Carrie. She takes her frustrations out on everyone.
- Sue and Tommy get a bit more time together, though it mostly covers ground from the novel.
- Billy is written better. He’s less of an outright psychopath and more of a traditional rebel with a bit of a sociopath in him.
The problem: it’s built to be a franchise
I didn’t know this going in, but Flanagan apparently signed a deal with Amazon Prime to produce content based on Stephen King’s books. He wants to do The Dark Tower, but Amazon came back and asked him about Carrie. Flanagan agreed to do the show, but then decided he wanted to transform the novel into a multi-season show with three seasons.
That’s where things start to go sideways. Without getting into specifics: the show adds new elements that exist mostly to set up future seasons or to simply pad what they have into eight full episodes, and it pulls focus from Carrie’s story right when it matters most, in the finale.
A Quick Refresher: The Original Novel
(Spoilers for a 50-year-old book, but nothing specific to the show.)
Carrie was King’s first novel. Carrie White is raised in a strictly religious household by her mother after her father dies when she’s very young. She’s had her powers since she was little. There’s the “rock incident,” when she was being punished for talking to the girl next door. But she doesn’t understand that she’s the one making things happen until the locker room incident. After that, she starts practicing at night.
When Tommy asks her to prom, she suspects it’s a setup. She’s afraid they’re going to humiliate her again, but she likes Tommy and wants to believe him. When the prank happens, she snaps and turns her powers on her classmates, the town and finally her mother. It’s worth stressing that in the book, Carrie is fully aware of what she’s doing.
The book is also told in an unusual way. About a third of it is narration as events unfold. The rest is told after the fact, through excerpts from Sue’s book and other third-party reports investigating the “incident.”
⚠️ SPOILER WARNING ⚠️
Everything below spoils the 2026 series, including the finale. Turn back now if you haven’t watched it.
The Spoiler Review
The new players
Flanagan adds a few new elements to the story:
- A group looking for children with abilities, and presumably taking them in. (X-Men, anyone?) One of its members can sense “outbursts” of power and track where they come from. They send two girls to the prom and then show up again after things calm down to interview the survivors.
- A group of parents whose children had abilities. They see these kids as abominations, and they believe the only way to “deal with” them is to kill them.
- Emaline. She shows up around the third episode and introduces herself to Carrie. The showrunners try to be clever about who she is. At first she’s meant to seem like just another outcast at school, but it’s pretty obvious that absolutely nobody reacts to or interacts with her. She pushes Carrie to start using her powers and even helps her train. Eventually we learn that Emaline has powers too: she can astral project herself into Carrie’s head. We also learn that her mother is part of the group of parents after Margaret seeks them out for help.
- Women with ‘power’ I want to say after the first episode, each of the other episodes adds a bit of padding, delving into history and how women with “power” have been treated by society. I kinda feel like all of this was mostly padding, including the decent but random scene where a desperate young woman has sought out help from a TV “psychic” — only to learn that he’s a fraud. The problem? Her power is real, and she doesn’t know how to handle it.
All of this feeds into a larger setup beyond the scope of King’s novel. And, all of it is left completely open-ended. We don’t learn anything about any of their motivations or how or if any of it will impact Carrie.
Prom night: “Let me drive”
Then prom night happens, and we learn Emaline has another power: she can possess people.
After the pig’s blood and Tommy’s “death,” Carrie is distraught. (Sorry, but Tommy dying from getting hit in the head with an empty pail is dumb. It’s dumb in the book, and it’s just as dumb in every adaptation.)
Carrie is frozen. Suddenly Emaline is there, and she says, “Let me drive.”
And she does. It’s Emaline, not Carrie, who goes on the killing spree. Emaline/Carrie start bumping off classmates at the prom, then leave to go after Chris and Billy. The show really glosses over how much damage they do to the town on the way. It’s suggested that they’re wrecking things while they “dance” together, but it’s pretty unclear how much mayhem they’re actually causing.
Carrie doesn’t come “back” until after they’ve murdered Chris and Billy, and she’s stunned when she realizes what Emaline has done. To be honest, it isn’t clear how aware Carrie was during any of this. The show never demonstrates this side of Emaline’s powers until that moment.
The aftermath
Carrie pushes Emaline out of her head and heads home. Margaret has been watching the news about everything happening in town, and she knows Carrie is behind it.
Margaret has decided to “take care” of Carrie, but first she helps her get cleaned up. After her run-in with the “death moms,” she remembers them saying that “you need to catch them unaware.” So she does her best to get Carrie to drop her guard, and they go into the closet to pray. Margaret tries to kill her, but Carrie is too fast. They fight, and Carrie literally brings the house down, leaving her mother for dead and wishing she were dead herself.
Then Emaline shows up at the house, in the flesh this time, to rescue Carrie. The last we see of them, they’re driving off into the sunset while Emaline tries to convince Carrie that “it’s your world now.”
Oh, then we finally meet the leader of the X-Girls (for lack of a better name). She interviews Carrie’s mother who survived the house collapse, and then she murders her by slowing and then stopping her heart. That scene is pretty disturbing, but they actually lifted it from the novel. It’s how Carrie killed her mother.
The only thing we do learn is that Emaline is not part of the X-Girls. We know her mother is part of the parental group who want to eliminate their children with powers. We don’t know what Emaline’s motivations are or her plans for Carrie.
Stay tuned for the next season of Carrie, right?
All of this leads to a couple of major problems with the series.
Problem #1: Carrie isn’t in control of her own story
They’ve effectively made Carrie a victim, someone who isn’t in control of herself during the events of prom night. Two things make that hard to swallow:
- The show doesn’t set her up as someone who would snap. Before prom, Carrie hurts only one person on purpose, and while she liked it, she also felt guilty about it. She has fewer regrets about using her powers on and around her mother after years of abuse. Even at the prom, she tells Tina, one of the girls who bullied her, that she “hopes she wins” prom queen. That catches Tina completely off guard, and she softens, even giving Carrie some half-hearted praise for her dress.
- The accelerated timeline. Carrie has years of built-up resentment toward her mother, but she’s only been in school a few weeks at most. There’s no time for her to build up the kind of hatred book Carrie has for her classmates and the town. Novel Carrie was bullied by everyone at school for years.
So what is she supposed to be now? Some kind of anti-hero? Is she going to team up with Charlie McGee from Firestarter and start a psychic super-squad? Emaline suggests that she’s taking Carrie “somewhere safe”, but where is that, and does that just mean Emaline or is there yet another group?
We just don’t know.
Problem #2: Carrie becomes a side character in her own show
Even the “CarrieRed” account barely involves her. It’s named after her, and she’s its first target, but nobody is mad at her about it. Everyone knows somebody else is running it. Most of Carrie’s bullying comes from Chris and her posse (minus Sue), and once the account spirals out of control, the story it tells has almost nothing to do with Carrie.
And don’t get me started on the teacher subplot.
One of the random things that comes out of the “CarrieRed” posts is that a student gets called out as a “teacher’s pet” of one of the male teachers. The students never outright accuse him of being involved with her, but once the wider community finds the account, the adults do. Ultimately, the teacher takes his own life.
I think having an innocent teacher take his own life over the accusations would have been a much stronger angle. But nope, the showrunners go the other way. He really was having an affair with the student, and he’d been involved with a student at his previous school too. If anything, that raises more questions about Chamberlain ISD’s hiring practices.
By this point, Chris has been accused of running the account and is facing suspension. Her father uses the “she exposed a pedo” angle to bully the school into letting her off the hook.
I get what they were going for: commentary on social media today. But again, once it gets out of hand, it has almost nothing to do with Carrie.
The franchise trap
That’s the real problem. Carrie falls into the same trap as other shows and movies that try to launch a “cinematic universe.” They get so wrapped up in world-building that they forget to tell one compelling story.
Look at Tom Cruise’s The Mummy. That movie was a complete mess, and it spent a lot of time setting up a “Dark Universe” built on the monsters Universal had the rights to. The Mummy bombed, and the Dark Universe never went anywhere. (Actually, I think Universal is trying again, this time at its theme parks.)
I think if you cut the show down by a couple of hours, extract all the “universe” crap – especially Emaline, then let Carrie just BE Carrie, the show would have been much better.
Final Verdict
Carrie is good, but it gets in its own way. The cast is excellent, and the modern take on bullying initially feels pretty grounded in reality. But, so much effort goes into stretching one novel into a multi-season show that it ends up ruining the finale. Worst of all, it takes the one thing that made Carrie Carrie, the fact that what happened on prom night was her choice, and hands it to somebody else.