![]() ![]() Most TV series need to finesse this handoff between the pilot director and the ones who create the rest of the show, but the challenge for Station Eleven was unusual. “Emily’s book has this very interesting tone, where it almost feels like it’s being narrated by this benevolent but distant omniscient presence,” says Murai, who directed two of the show’s ten episodes and created its visual identity, which the three other directors - Jeremy Podeswa, Helen Shaver, and Lucy Tcherniak - used as a framework. The biggest obstacle for the show was how to transform Mandel’s detached yet loving tone into a visual vernacular. In the series, he is an embodied character, floating in space and watching over the characters from a gracious but far-flung remove. In Mandel’s book, he is the central character in a graphic novel within the novel also titled Station Eleven. Eleven, a mysterious metafictional spaceman. One of the novel’s chief ideas is painted on the side of one of the wagons the troupe travels the country in: “Because survival is insufficient.” It is a pandemic novel that refuses to reduce humanity to simple existential fear, and its ideas are concentrated in the figure of Dr. Its principal characters include Jeevan, a man who has to redefine himself in the new world, and Kirsten, an actress who, in the years after the flu, joins a Shakespearean theater troupe called the Traveling Symphony. Any dully frightening visual adaptation would be an impoverished iteration of the book’s pragmatic but humane worldview. But it is primarily a novel about art and how a ravaged populace would still long for transcendent experiences of beauty and performance. It’s a looping story that slips swiftly from a present-day pandemic to 20 years later then back again. ![]() John Mandel book the series is based on follows a handful of characters before and after a near-extinction-level flu wipes out most of humanity. Showrunner Patrick Somerville took his cues from the source material. “It has, weirdly, a childlike wonder to it.” “It isn’t this Cormac McCarthy–bleak desert landscape,” director Hiro Murai says. It occasionally depicts the magnitude of the catastrophe, but it is mostly about small things: the mundanity of the apocalypse inside a small midwestern airport, a marriage that is falling apart. Rather than a gray, desaturated landscape, the show’s post-pandemic world is lush, green, alive. The series Station Eleven is the inverse of everything we’ve come to expect from the postapocalyptic genre. Showrunner Patrick Somerville (left) and director Hiro Murai.
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