Station Eleven Review

The novel is a mosaic and Patrick Somerville's adaptation is braver with it than most, rearranging Emily St. John Mandel's book rather than transcribing it, and inventing a bond between Jeevan and the child Kirsten that the page never had. Hiro Murai opens the series: a Chicago production of King Lear where the lead dies on stage on the night a flu arrives, after which Himesh Patel's Jeevan walks a girl he met an hour ago home through a city with about four days left.

It then jumps twenty years to a caravan of actors and musicians crossing the Great Lakes performing Shakespeare, Survival Is Insufficient painted along the side of a wagon, Mackenzie Davis playing Kirsten as a woman who has built an entire self out of one play and one comic book. Matilda Lawler is extraordinary as the younger version. The hour handed over to Miranda, played by Danielle Deadwyler, who drew the graphic novel that gives the show its name, is the best in it and barely advances the plot.

Against that: the timeline shuffling asks a great deal in the early episodes, and the Prophet strand resolves more neatly than the rest has earned. Seven Emmy nominations and almost no audience. It arrived in December 2021, the worst imaginable moment for it, and it is the kindest thing anybody has made about the end of the world.