Station Eleven Helped Me Believe In an After
I almost missed out on one of the best pieces of art I’ve ever experienced, and it’s because I failed to imagine what a TV adaptation of a book could be.
On December 16, 2021, HBO Max released the first three episodes of Station Eleven, Patrick Somerville’s adaptation of Emily St. John Mandel’s 2014 novel by the same name. I don’t know what I was doing that night, but it wasn’t sitting down to watch three hours of television about people who survive a deadly global pandemic. I had read Mandel’s novel around the time of its original publication, and while I remembered enjoying it, that’s about all I remembered.
I also remembered that when HBO announced in 2019 that an adaptation was in the works with Mackenzie Davis cast in a lead role, I perked because she’s fantastic in everything she does (Halt and Catch Fire remains criminally under-celebrated), but I think I knew way down in my heart of hearts that the chances I’d actually watch it were 50-50 at best. When I thought back on reading Station Eleven, it was so firmly in the realm of not terribly memorable that I wasn’t sure how much to care about the adaptation. I didn’t have a deep enough attachment to the book to feel invested in how faithfully the show represented particular characters or events — to be honest, very few books live in that zone for me, but let’s talk when Taika Waititi’s adaptation of Klara and the Sun comes out — and I wasn’t interested enough in the story to undertake a re-read in preparation for its release.
Then 2020 happened, and while I know many folks processed the arrival of Covid through stories about other disastrous viral contagions, I spent the early months of the pandemic reading E.B. White’s old New Yorker columns about living on a farm in coastal Maine. When you need gentle content, you reach for the fella who gave us Charlotte’s Web.
By the time Station Eleven premiered nearly two years and thousands of pages of E.B. White later, I was vaxxed, boosted, and slowly making my way toward something that looked like normal, but I was painfully aware of how tenuous it all was. A few weeks prior, during a funicular ride down a mountain in Palm Springs, the tram operator had put “Sweet Caroline” on the PA system, and I burst into tears when my fellow travelers joined in song. The moment was sublime and delicate, a spontaneous expression of collective joy after an extended period of isolation and grief. It was magical, and my heart was so fragile. I needed every morsel of beauty and connection I could find. A show about the onset and aftermath of a pandemic seemed antithetical to my cause.
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