On the same principle that lots of us rewatched Soderbergh's Contagion in the early days of the first lockdown1, HBO stands to do well with an adaptation of Station Eleven:
The show, based on Emily St. John Mandel’s 2014 international bestseller, follows the survivors of a flu pandemic.
Despite the desperate realities of the world at present, it seems there’s a continuing thirst for post-apocalyptic stories. Station Eleven sees a devastating flu pandemic and follows its survivors as they they attempt to rebuild society.
It seems to be getting enough favourable reviews to suggest that it's going to be worthwhile, and at the end of January 2022 it's going to be available to UK viewers via STARZplay (which should mean it'll be viewable through Apple TV+ or Prime Video and so on.)
HBO's trailer for the US release makes the show look worth watching:
If, like me, you're utterly unfamiliar with the source material you might find promo useful:
Me, I'm seeing Mackenzie Davis and Himesh Patel (both actors who I think did good work in past projects - Halt And Catch Fire and Yesterday respectively - that didn't bring them the plaudits they were due) in a speculative fiction show that has some interesting ideas and I'm there. The only question is whether I pony up for a STARZplay subscription that I plan upfront to cancel after 1 month or whether I wait until the end of the first season then binge the entire season in the free trial period. I realise the latter option isn't exactly playing fair with the spirit in which STARZplay offers a free trial, but then Lions Gate Entertainment Corporation have no doubt costed into their projections how many viewers will "abuse our generosity"2 like this.
My worry about Station Eleven would be that it'll be in danger of starting out as an even-in-an-apocalypse-human-beings-need-the-arts-too story and by season four it'll turn into a hellish even-good-people-discover-that-they-have-to-harden-themselves-to-defend-what-they've-got spectacle. It'd be a shame to see all that behind the scenes production talent devoting itself to ensuring the small arms deployed by the characters are definitely capable of bringing down a human being at twenty paces in the bloodiest and most final way possible so as to head off a social media shitstorm if some gun fetishist on Facebook posts a video proving that this inaccurate small arms detail is yet another sign that Hollywood's Liberal Communist Elitists are disrespecting Real Americans again.
In fairness, neither the Wikipedia summary of the source novel nor the entry on the novel's author in the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction suggest that's the direction a faithful adaptation would go in. Not to mention that HBO are probably not the adapters I'd expect to veer that far from the source material.
- I thinktwenty years from now the consensus will be that audiences mostly just wanted to see Gwyneth Paltrow's corpse with the top of her head peeled off during her character's autopsy. If they couldn't have it for real, they'd take it in fiction even if it was embedded in such an unsettling story given the circumstances. ↩
- As they'd no doubt put it, if they thought that adopting the tone of a stuffy British TV executive who felt he or she was entitled to some of our money even where audiences were following the rules the producers laid down when making the free trial period offer in the first place would convince such miscreants to mend their ways. ↩