![]() The most notable change it makes is having Jeevan’s (Himesh Patel) encounter with Kirsten (Matilda Lawler as a child, Mackenzie Davis as an adult) at the theater result in him trying to help her find her parents. In TV series form, Station Eleven shifts several things around. Mandel drops in short interstitial chapters that tell the stories of various other characters important to the narrative, particularly Arthur’s ex-wife Miranda, whose chapter is my favorite part of the book.ĥ reasons the post-apocalyptic Station Eleven was my favorite novel of 2014 And it jumps back into the past to trace the rise of Arthur alongside his many friends and colleagues. It stays with Jeevan in the present, as he holes up in an apartment with his brother and watches the world end from high above. It hops forward 20 years into the future to follow Kirsten as an adult, riding around the Great Lakes with the Traveling Symphony theater company in a world after the Georgia Flu killed so many. ![]() And Jeevan is a would-be doctor who attempts to save Arthur’s life after he collapses from a heart attack during a performance. Arthur is a brash movie star trying to burnish his reputation by playing one of Shakespeare’s greatest characters. Kirsten is a child actor, playing the role of one of Lear’s daughters as a child. In book form, Station Eleven follows three characters who have a chance meeting onstage at a Toronto theater during a production of King Lear. “This strange and awful time was the happiest of my life” I entered the series deeply skeptical, and I left it feeling at least semi-hopeful for what humanity might yet become, even after the end. Rather than imagining something bleak, Station Eleven takes Mandel’s book and amps up its sense of a cozy post-apocalypse, where humanity comes together, rather than drifting apart. 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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