Maybe you’re not in the mood for entertainment about a pandemic that wipes out much of the world’s population. I get it. That being said, Station Eleven looks pretty dang good. Based on Emily St. John Mandel’s Arthur C. Clarke Award-winning novel of the same name, the HBO Max limited series is described as a “post-apocalyptic saga spanning multiple timelines” that tells “the stories of survivors of a devastating flu as they attempt to rebuild and reimagine the world anew while holding on to the best of what’s been lost.”
Cheery stuff, but Station Eleven has a solid cast, including Mackenzie Davis, Himesh Patel, Gael García Bernal, and Lori Petty, and the behind-the-scenes talent includes creator Patrick Somerville (The Leftovers, Maniac) and Atlanta director Hiro Murai.
Game of Thrones author George R.R. Martin praised Station Eleven as one of the best books he read in 2014. “One could, I suppose, call it a post-apocalypse novel, and it is that, but all the usual tropes of that subgenre are missing here, and half the book is devoted to flashbacks to before the coming of the virus that wipes out the world, so it’s also a novel of character, and there’s this thread about a comic book and Doctor Eleven and a giant space station and… oh, well, this book should NOT have worked, but it does,” he wrote on his blog. “It’s a deeply melancholy novel, but beautifully written, and wonderfully elegiac… a book that I will long remember, and return to.”
Station Eleven, which also stars Daniel Zovatto, David Wilmot, Matilda Lawler, Philippine Velge, Nabhaan Rizwan, and Danielle Deadwyler, debuts on HBO Max on December 16.