Under the Dome, based on Stephen King's novel, is set in a small New England town trapped under an impermeable bubble that seems to have fallen, inexplicably, from the heavens. The 13-episode series premieres Monday at 10 ET/PT.

This seaport town near Wilmington, and neighboring Burgaw, are standing in for Chester's Mill, Maine, the hamlet where Stephen King set his nearly 1,100-page 2009 novel that inspired the series. Although Dome is being filmed near the coast amid Carolina pines, "we're playing this show as taking place in Anywhere, America," said executive producer Neal Baer, to USA Today.

Creator Brian Vaughan, a writer/producer on Lost for three seasons, says life under the dome doesn't exactly reflect the book, but it is his inspiration. He calls the heft of King's novel a blessing - "to have that much good material from a writer I love that much. The one thing Stephen told us is, feel free to use the book as a launching point. My challenge was, what do you leave out?"

On the first day of shooting, on a sunny day in late February, actors covered with fake blood stumble into the clinic after the dome slams down on the little town. Thanks to green-screen technology, it will look in the finished film like a woman wearing a green glove lost her hand as the edge of the dome fell on her arm as she was gardening.

Just outside the clinic, cars and trucks are randomly scattered, as if a toy box filled with Matchbox cars has been upended.

The story's triumvirate of good and evil includes used-car salesman Big Jim Rennie (Dean Norris, Breaking Bad), military vet Dale "Barbie" Barbara (Mike Vogel, Pan Am) and Julia Shumway (Rachelle Lefevre, Twilight), editor of the town newspaper.

Big Jim, played by Dean Norris, is the primary villain. Since 2008 Norris has portrayed Hank Schrader, meth dealer Walter White's DEA agent brother-in-law on AMC's Breaking Bad.

The stark contrast between Hank and Big Jim is "awesome," says Norris. "It's completely the opposite of Hank Schrader. It's really a blast."

Shumway is a big-city journalist who moves to Chester's Mill to lick her wounds. It's through her journalistic eye - as editor/reporter for the Chester's Mill newspaper - that much of the drama unfolds.

"Each (character) is so different in the way they handle events; viewers will surely see themselves in one or another," Lefevre says, but "the amazing thing about shooting the series is that our main character, the dome, never appears until postproduction.

In the author's note King wrote at the end of Under the Dome, he said he tried to write a book "that would consistently keep the pedal to the medal."

King "always kept the hammer down, and that's what we want to do," Vaughan told USA Today. "We hit the ground running, right from the time the dome drops, and we don't let up after that."