After more than a year in development, Stephen King's Under The Dome is at last headed to television—though not on cable, as originally planned and hoped for, considering all the violence and disemboweling and stuff. Showtime's corporate sister CBS has picked up the project with a straight-to-series order of 13 episodes due to air next summer, in the wake of Showtime passing on the premise for not fitting in with the rest of Showtime's programming (such as a disappointing lack of plotlines in which the dome had sex with someone it shouldn't). All the original behind-the-scenes people are still attached, however: Steven Spielberg's Amblin Television is producing and the script from Brian K. Vaughan is still in play, with Law And Order: SVU's Neal Baer now attached as showrunner and Niels Arden Oplev, director of the original The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, on board to helm the first chapter.
No one involved has yet indicated what the move from cable to broadcast might mean for realizing King's 2009 novel, which concerns a small New England town trapped under a dome that's nearly as massive as the book itself. But since it's now on CBS, presumably each week will find the dome solving an exciting new crime. "I'm not the only thing around here you can see right through," the dome will say to some lying, nervous perp, shortly before he brings the dome-hammer down.