You Should Be Watching ‘Station Eleven’ On HBO Max, ‘The Leftovers’ Meets ‘The Last Of Us’

These days with so many streaming services in existence and so much new content dumped out every few days, it can be hard to know where to even start. But if I can make one recommendation of a series you may not have heard of, it would be Station 11, currently about to wrap up its first season on HBO Max.

Station Eleven is getting little press or promotion, yet it has a 97% critic average, which I’d consider well-deserved. It’s based on a book by Emily St. John Mandel that won the Arthur C. Clarke sci-fi award back in 2015, and has now been adapted into a series that conveys the unreal weirdness of a pandemic apocalypse, timed to match our own current situation, though I believe this was on deck well before Covid-19 hit.

The world of Station Eleven is much more dire than our own, even in its current state. Its pandemic, whose origins are left somewhat nebulous, has something akin to a 1 in 1000 survival rate, and most of the world’s population is wiped out as a result.

The show flashes back and forth between the days and weeks after the pandemic and present day, twenty years later, following the same character, Kirsten. She starts as a young stage actress sheltering in place with a kind stranger, but eventually has to find her own way in the new world, joining up with a traveling theater troupe that exists in this desolate new world, trying to bring cheer and culture to the remaining pockets of humans they come across in their midwestern performance circuit.

This is unlike any other apocalypse production I’ve ever seen before. There are no zombies here, but there are threats. A mysterious enemy called The Prophet seems intent on murdering Kirsten’s friends, and the two share a surprising connection. One minute the show will have a little girl putting on a play with friends, the next, a home invader leaves two dead at the end of a hunting knife. The constant tone shifts are jarring, but effective.

The highlight here is Kirsten actress Mackenzie Davis, star of Halt and Catch Fire, Terminator: Dark Fate and Blade Runner 2049, who plays a mix of whimsical actress with the harder edge of a feral survivor, when the occasion calls for it.

Station Eleven is a philosophical series where it’s extreme weirdness and character introspection does feel the most similar to the beloved HBO series, The Leftovers, in many ways, and the two shows share Patrick Somerville, who was a writer on The Leftovers and now the showrunner of Station Eleven. The more brutal parts remind me of what a good Last of Us adaptation might look like, a project that, incidentally, HBO is also currently working on right now.

Station Eleven is not getting the attention it deserves, and it reminds me of Raised by Wolves, another HBO Max sci-fi original that was much better than the proportional press it was getting. Station Eleven may be even better, and I highly suggest you get to at least episode 3 or 4 before making a final judgement, as it takes a little while to warm up to what’s going on here. And yes, it will be very weird.

This seems like it will be a miniseries that will end when the book ends, a self-contained story you can binge all at once when it’s over in two weeks. But sure, catch up now if you want, and watch the penultimate episode and finale the following two Thursdays.

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Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.