Amazon Prime Video’s eight-episode take on Stephen King’s Carrie does not open by leering into the girls’ locker-room shower. Glad tidings? That depends, I suppose, on one’s perspective. Whereas Brian De Palma’s 1976 film adaptation was exploitative schlock, it possessed a certain enviable élan vital, not least when exploring the ferality of unsupervised teenagers. Prime’s version, by contrast, is a comparatively restrained affair. Think early Stranger Things, reborn as an ironic anti-cyberbullying public service announcement.
The show gives the title role to former child actress Summer H. Howell, veteran of Curse of Chucky (2013) and other slasher fare. A 22-year-old who looks a decade younger, Howell is an ideal fit for a part that requires not only emotional but physical immaturity — the sense of a body not yet under its owner’s full control. Surrounded by older co-stars, among them 27-year-old Alison Thornton as chief mean girl Chris Hargensen, Howell plays King’s famous vengeance seeker as an irresistible social target. Slight, overdressed, and unacquainted with sarcasm, our heroine is as likely to succeed in an American public school as she would be parachuted among the natives of some undiscovered Pacific isle.
Luckily, Carrie is packing heat, if by “heat” we mean the ability to start fires with her mind, among other telekinetic tricks. Tease the poor girl at your peril. She may be new to Ewen High after a homeschooled youth, but she will break your nose with a wink as soon as she looks at you. To be fair, Carrie’s classmates have grown even crueler in the 50 years since De Palma’s film plumbed the depths of high-school misery. Given new tools — phone cameras, Instagram, and the rhythms of the attention economy — Chris and company have turned grades 9-12 into a merciless gauntlet from which even temporary escape can’t be had.
Summer H. Howell and Samantha Sloyan in “Carrie.” (Amazon Prime)
" data-large-file="https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/11/LA.TV_.111126.jpg?w=1024" height="658" width="1024" src="https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/11/LA.TV_.111126.jpg?w=1024" alt="Summer H. Howell and Samantha Sloyan in "Carrie." (Amazon Prime)" class="wp-image-4795121" srcset="https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/11/LA.TV_.111126.jpg 1400w, https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/11/LA.TV_.111126.jpg?resize=300,193 300w, https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/11/LA.TV_.111126.jpg?resize=768,494 768w, https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/11/LA.TV_.111126.jpg?resize=1024,658 1024w" sizes="(max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px">
Summer H. Howell and Samantha Sloyan in “Carrie.” (Amazon Prime)
The new show isn’t just about what adolescents do to one another in cyberspace. Make no mistake, though: That wasteland of unreason is very much a part of what creator Mike Flanagan (The Fall of the House of Usher) means to portray. Having already led a group assault on Carrie in which feminine hygiene products become projectiles, Chris proceeds to place humiliating images of the scene online. Thus is born an anonymous social media account by the name of @CarrieRed, a meme collective in which students school-wide begin assailing their rivals with grotesque insinuations and lies.
For us geezers in the audience, Flanagan takes care to explain the impossible position in which these events place Principal Henry Grayle (Matthew Lillard), a well-meaning sort utterly unequipped to reconcile the competing demands of free speech and freedom from harassment. On one side is Chris’s reptilian father, John (Michael Trucco), a lawyer with a collapsing professional life but just enough expertise to be deadly. On the other is the book’s and movie’s central hate figure, Carrie’s mother, Margaret (Samantha Sloyan), transformed here from a fearsome religious fanatic to a fearsome religious fanatic with a keen understanding of public relations.
This Carrie is a great show precisely because it trades its source material’s campy scares for a cagey look at cultural malaise. Indeed, the production’s most terrifying shot is surely the rapture on Chris’s face as she makes her first @CarrieRed post. (“It is as sport to a fool to do mischief,” one can almost hear a Bible-clutching Margaret intone.) Still, for all her wickedness, Chris is herself an object of pity, scorned by her self-centered parents and abandoned by her ostensible best friend, Sue (Siena Agudong). One might wish to reach into the screen and shake the young woman, but one is unlikely, without some hesitation, to despise her.
Summer H. Howell in “Carrie.” (Amazon Prime)
" data-large-file="https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/11/LA.TV2_.111126.jpg?w=1024" height="658" width="1024" src="https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/11/LA.TV2_.111126.jpg?w=1024" alt="Summer H. Howell in "Carrie." (Amazon Prime)" class="wp-image-4795125" srcset="https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/11/LA.TV2_.111126.jpg 1400w, https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/11/LA.TV2_.111126.jpg?resize=300,193 300w, https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/11/LA.TV2_.111126.jpg?resize=768,494 768w, https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/11/LA.TV2_.111126.jpg?resize=1024,658 1024w" sizes="(max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px">
Summer H. Howell in “Carrie.” (Amazon Prime)
In a move I wouldn’t have seen coming in a million years, the series extends similar grace to Margaret, in previous treatments a walking manifestation of Hollywood’s and Big Publishing’s anti-Christian animus. It’s not that the character is likable here; it’s that she’s so obviously smarter than others that viewers have no choice but to take her seriously. Moreover, this iteration of Margaret makes clear that one can, in fact, dismantle the master’s house with the master’s tools, our social-justice friends’ protestations to the contrary notwithstanding. Tormented by an unpleasant boss, Margaret simply spreads rumors that her foe uses racial slurs. A scene or two later, we see the unkindly manager fired on the spot.
Carrie takes great pleasure in turning the Left’s pieties inside out, thus exposing their hollowness. Faced with an overmatched Principal Grayle, Margaret accuses the school of “emotional violence” against her daughter, a line from the progressive script that no educrat can coherently oppose. Possessed of an iPhone and ring light, the older woman rallies the internet to her side in the name of “safety.” Even the character’s wonkier barbs tend to take material from left-leaning sources. Grousing that high schoolers must undergo active-shooter drills more often than the police, Margaret recycles talking points from a 2024 ProPublica exposé.
REVIEW: ‘AMERICAN HOSTAGE,’ WITH JON HAMM, HAS RESONANCE WITH THE PAST
I wasn’t expecting a populist Carrie, full of scorn for our politics-as-usual elite. Now that it’s here, I love it. Yet the show is also a thoughtful examination of adolescent joy and rage, extremes to which foils Chris and Carrie are alternately drawn. In one of the loveliest scenes of the TV year, Flanagan and director Kate Siegel juxtapose the two girls’ rides home from a party, ably capturing the young women’s shared capacity to feel. Having just learned that her parents are divorcing, Chris stares from the car window, attempting not to cry. Carrie, lost in the first flush of social validation, briefly causes her vehicle to float.
Carrie’s tragedy is that its two most important characters can’t slip from their predetermined roles, so unyielding are the teenage hierarchies that divide them. It’s a real shame. The girls didn’t have to slouch inexorably toward a fiery prom-night bloodbath. They could have been friends.
Graham Hillard is the TV critic for the Washington Examiner magazine.
Continue reading...
[ H/T Washington Examiner ]
