Station Eleven

Given the largely positive reviews that Station Eleven got, regular readers may not be surprised to learn that I ended up shelling out for a STARZPLAY subscription with the plan of watching the ten episodes then deciding whether to let my subscription roll over for another month. There's other content I'd been meaning to watch1 so we'll see how long they can keep my interest.

I'm up to episode five so far, and while the show has been a bit uneven so far as they've introduced the characters my worries that the show might veer into a more Walking Dead-style take on the apocalypse have abated. I'm mostly enjoying some excellent acting and a cast of characters who are (so far) very much not taking the story in that sort of relentlessly grim direction.

More to say once I catch up with the end of the show, but I do have two negative points about the wider experience of watching the show:

  1. Whilst the official podcast has all the access to the cast and crew one could wish for, the content is so self-congratulatory about just how brilliant everyone was that it can be hard to take. This is why for other shows I mostly steer clear of their official podcasts, but I haven't had time to locate a suitable non-official alternative for this show yet.
  2. The STARZPLAY app for iPadOS breaks so many of John Siracusa's (unsolicited) rules for streaming apps it's ridiculous and is also just horribly unreliable when it comes to just playing streaming video, full stop. Silent crashes, the app reacting to a wrong touch by returning me to the start of my episode multiple times per episode, it's infuriating. They're lucky the content is worth the perseverance required.

  1. I definitely need to see Counterpart from scratch, and it'd be good to finish off Fringe after I made it to the end of season 2 in an earlier watch on NowTV earlier in the pandemic.