Yet few fictional works in the wake of Covid-19 have felt as restorative to me as this TV adaptation from Leftovers writer Patrick Somerville and Atlanta director Hiro Murai. It would have been so easy to create a version of this story where those changes made the series toothless and without a point. Two characters who have one chance meeting shortly before the Georgia Flu ravages the world are now boon companions for the early days of the apocalypse, and the book’s main villain has been drastically rethought. What’s more, Station Eleven makes several adaptation choices that change some of the core elements of Mandel’s novel.
So it might seem ghoulish to tell a story about a disease so deadly only one in 1,000 people survives it (heavy air quotes) “at this moment in history.”
Its resonance with the present moment is so strong that in March 2020, days before most of the US locked down, Vulture interviewed Mandel about her book’s overlap with the present. Two episodes follow every Thursday thereafter until the finale drops all by its lonesome on January 13.)īut Station Eleven is also a book about the world in the build-up to and aftermath of a devastating plague that kills most of humanity. (The first three episodes debut Thursday.
Station Eleven is one of my favorite books of the 21st century so far, and its blend of magical realism, clockwork plotting, post-apocalyptic setting, and complicated structure offers enough imaginative detours for HBO Max’s 10-episode TV adaptation to have fun with. John Mandel’s brilliant 2014 novel Station Eleven. The 2021 holiday season feels like an exceptionally strange and potentially awful time to launch a miniseries adaptation of Emily St.
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