The first episode, directed by Hiro Murai (“Atlanta”), renders the apocalypse as both epic and intimate.
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As the elder Kirsten, Davis bursts with expression as the precocious but vulnerable young Kirsten, Lawler gives one of the best child performances I’ve seen on TV since Kiernan Shipka in “Mad Men.” “Station Eleven” wants to you feel everything - joy and despair, tragedy and comedy.
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So the series conveys the anguish of the pandemic with a few well-chosen scenes, rather than letting them accumulate to the point of numbness. “Station Eleven” involves a bigger loss but it has a similar sensibility: wistful, sardonic and focused on life after catastrophe rather than the catastrophe itself. Patrick Somerville, who adapted Mandel’s novel for television, previously worked on HBO’s “The Leftovers,” which took place after the unexplained disappearance of 2 percent of the world’s population. In one episode, the Symphony members share a dinner of vacuum-sealed M.R.E.s with an old colleague (David Cross), who’s living on a landmine-strewn golf course and writing a giant history he calls “The Book of Joy and Despair.” Another has settled in a regional airport, where its members try to preserve the memories and creature comforts of the past. The Traveling Symphony, led by the cantankerous Conductor (Lori Petty), is one such group. In a way, “Station Eleven” shares as much with frontier stories as with apocalypse stories, in that it is partly about how you start a community from scratch. (iPhones, to them, are like magical totems from mythology.)
There’s a generation gap between “prepans,” who survived the plague, and “postpans,” born after, who lack the same attachment to the past. Governments have collapsed, but civilization has, in small pockets, regrouped. Their life seems almost idyllic, if not for the reminders of the danger that could result if they stray from “The Wheel,” their rigid tour loop. She’s playing Hamlet with the Traveling Symphony, a ragtag theater and music troupe in the Great Lakes. The 10-episode limited series jumps between the early days of the plague and two decades later, when Kirsten ( Mackenzie Davis, “Halt and Catch Fire”) has somehow managed to continue her acting career after the apocalypse.
After a detour to buy about $10,000 in groceries, the pair seal themselves up in a high-rise apartment with Jeevan’s brother, Frank (Nabhaan Rizwan), where they watch an errant airliner crash into the Chicago skyline. Kirsten’s parents are unreachable, the reasons for which dawn chillingly that night as patients begin to crowd the hospitals. The ensuing chaos brings together Jeevan Chaudhary (Himesh Patel), an underemployed writer in the audience, with Kirsten Raymonde (Matilda Lawler), an 8-year-old actress playing one of Lear’s daughters as a child.
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It begins with a play: On a wintry night in Chicago, the movie star Arthur Leander (Gael García Bernal) collapses and dies onstage while playing King Lear. At times dark and heartbreaking, it’s also luminous, wondrous, even funny - the most uplifting show about life after the end of the world that you are likely to see.
John Mandel, “Station Eleven,” whose first three episodes arrive Thursday on HBO Max, focuses less on survival (a preoccupation of even the sitcom “The Last Man on Earth” and Netflix’s fanciful “Sweet Tooth”) than on how the human spirit, as expressed through art, insists on thriving. Twenty years later, the survivors are eking out a preindustrial life amid the ruins.īut would you believe me if I told you that, somehow, things are also better? Or if not “better” exactly, then far more hopeful than TV’s other apocalypses, from “The Walking Dead” to “Y: The Last Man,” would have led you to expect.īased on the 2014 novel by Emily St. A powerful flu virus rips across the globe almost overnight, killing most of humanity. Things could always be worse, and in “Station Eleven,” they are.
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