I’ll have more to say about this, but first just a quick note to confirm that now that the STARZPLAY stream of HBO’s Station Eleven has come to an end I’m delighted I went to the trouble of seeking the show out.
The story and the way they chose to tell it took a few episodes to get used to, but by the time they had trained their audience in what to expect from the story their clever, lyrical approach to adapting an existing tale paid massive dividends.
Arguments about how realistic the story of this particular post-apocalyptic pocket of human civilisation was are, in my opinion, missing the point. The author of the source material wanted to tell a story that took an optimistic view of what could happen in the wake of a ruinous pandemic given an attitude that survival was insufficient, and the showrunners seem to have honoured that by producing a show that has to be one of the highlights of what’s been a little bit of a golden age for televised speculative fiction over the last couple of years, between Station Eleven and Devs and Tales From The Loop.