When Emily St. John Mandel’s bestselling novel Station Eleven debuted in 2014, North American culture (and beyond) was gripped with post-apocalypse fascination. Y.A. fiction was rife with dystopia, thanks in large part to The Hunger Games and its attendant film franchise. The Walking Dead was one of the biggest shows in the world; HBO’s The Leftovers would appear that year, too. 

Mandel’s book, then, was greeted as something of a refreshment. The novel is a decades-spanning look at the immediate onset and long-lingering effects of a flu pandemic that kills billions. The ragged, miraculously hopeful survivors (well, some of them are hopeful, anyway) begin to form new societies and customs, wary and laden with loss but still possessed of humanity’s inner fire, its hunger for connection and some kind of earthly transcendence. This was no zombie horror, but rather an expansively poetic musing on a species’s capacity to endure. Station Eleven rescues something like comfort out of all its boggling sorrow. 

It’s a gorgeous and satisfying novel, dense with crisscrossing narratives and recurring motifs. It is, somehow, richly cinematic while seeming entirely unfilmable. For all the novel’s talk of the performing arts—the central storyline follows a traveling theater company as they make their way around the Great Lakes region, 20 years after the plague—Station Eleven is very dependent on its interior prose; its lyrical observations and ruminations; its intricate but gentle threading of disparate plots and characters. There is action and occasion in the story, but it’s described from a watchful remove, with a summative omniscience. 

But dreamers are going to dream. And so the television writer Patrick Somerville (The Leftovers, Maniac) set out to adapt Station Eleven anyway, employing a small team of writers and collaborating with Atlanta director Hiro Murai to set the show’s bespoke visual language. The result, also called Station Eleven (HBO Max, December 16), is scattershot and transfixing, an adaptation that honors much of Mandel’s tone and intent but alters and expands (not always for the better) the world she so wondrously built. 

The bones are the same, with some location shifts. A flu breaks out in 2020. Most people die quickly, but some—naturally immune or just very lucky—make it through. An 8-year-old girl, Kirsten (Matilda Lawler), is thrown into the protective custody of a hangdog journalist, Jeevan (Himesh Patel), once it becomes clear her family died while Kirsten was at the theater where she was to play a minor role in a Chicago production of King Lear, starring a movie star, Arthur Leander (Gael Garcia Bernal). Arthur’s ex-wife, Miranda (Danielle Deadwyler), a logistics expert in the shipping industry who is also working on a graphic novel called Station Eleven, gets stuck in Malaysia as the crisis reaches a frenzied crescendo, while Arthur’s sodden old friend, Clark (David Wilmot), finds himself marooned at a small Michigan airport with another of Arthur’s exes, actress Elizabeth (Caitlin FitzGerald). 

These characters, and more, are spun off on different trajectories that, in their elliptical structure, occasionally intersect as the years tumble along. The show, like so many mini-series of the moment, is told in multiple timelines—a frustrating device on even an assured show such as this. Mandel’s novel also jumps around between present and future, but that’s easier to follow on the page. 

Station Eleven the series smartly mitigates some of that disorientation (while encouraging it elsewhere) by devoting certain episodes to a handful of characters in one time and place. The grander mural of interconnectivity—all this fate and chance dancing around these curious happenings, following these characters over the course of their lives—is revealed only in aggregate, once the viewer has made their way through all 10 episodes and can regard the finished product in its quilted completion. 

Watching those ten episodes is not exactly easy. For obvious reasons, seeing obliviousness turn to dread as characters learn of the virus’s swift spread provokes a certain familiar anxiety that gives way to an aching, bone-deep sadness. In that way, a viewer must place real trust in Station Eleven’s characters to lead them toward the story’s version of deliverance. There’s something instructive in that. The series perhaps most resonantly functions as a map out of despair, or at least toward some acceptance of the belief that, as many things fall apart, new purpose and meaning may begin to poke up out of the ruined earth—for a fortunate few, anyway. 

Art is, in Station Eleven’s view, one of the chief vessels of that renewal and resilience. An older Kirsten, played by Mackenzie Davis, is a member of the Travelling Symphony, a merry-ish band of players and musicians who tinker around the Upper Peninsula of Michigan in a caravan, bringing a few nights of revelry and solemn wonder (often in the form of Shakespeare plays) to the various rickety settlements they return to each year on their cyclical migration. Miranda’s comic book is the most persistent talisman of all, bearing heavily on the worldviews of Kirsten and another character who was also a child when the world ended. 

The way Station Eleven traces a piece of culture as it traverses human epochs will remind some theatergoers of Anne Washburn’s 2012 play Mr. Burns, a Post-Electric Play, which follows a Simpsons episode’s evolution into ritual lore over the many years after a calamity. Both works persuasively imagine a text’s eternal value, and more broadly consider how fundamental storytelling, recitation, and the generational exchange of thought are to the human experience. 

Station Eleven the series could do a little more to embolden that idea, though. There are a few arresting sequences where the art being performed mirrors and informs the life of the characters. Andrew Wyeth’s painting “Christina’s World” is directly evoked in one tableau, perhaps suggesting that an alignment of place and person and perspective, in one form framed and buried in a dusty and empty MoMA, may somehow naturally emerge again out of the chaos of the world. But the specific content of the eponymous graphic novel remains a bit too vague for how heavily some of its imagery is leaned upon. Its message and import is implied, but never quite elucidated.

As was probably a requirement of a big-budget TV series like this, Station Eleven also ramps up the violence and danger, making some rather large changes to Mandel’s story to create more convergent tension. This means that some of the show’s more intellectual and emotional throughlines get less time than they might otherwise—and certainly less than they deserve. Even with those flashier, more sellable additions, though, Station Eleven could still prove too deliberate and elusive for some viewers, just as The Leftovers did. It’s a series that demands both close attention and a passive willingness to let the words and meticulously crafted images wash over you, a collage that gradually forms itself but still demands your engagement. 

Not all of the various story pieces click seamlessly into place. Some digressions bear ripe thematic fruit; others tread riskily close to artsy indulgence. The performances are consistently strong, all studies in the scratchy idiosyncrasy and variance of people. Characters behave poorly and heroically, they are selfish and generous—a generosity that, by the close of the series, has begun to seem like the true great work of living among a community, hard won and yet as natural as any more harmful impulse. 

Hovering over all this is the lonely astronaut of Miranda’s graphic novel, glimpsed on occasion by characters in moments of need or release. Maybe the astronaut is the God of a whole religion not yet built or discovered. Maybe he’s us in the past, gazing at one version of our difficult future. Maybe he is simply the manifestation of all of our vast and petty human questions, a reminder of our mortality and of some endless cosmic ribbon passing through each of us. 

Much of the Station Eleven watched over by this astronaut is tattered and forlorn. Gulping down the show this week has led to some odd and melancholy dreams, along with a few waking moments of existential unease. But a warming grace slowly envelops Station Eleven, and its audience. Perhaps the faith the series places in messy, errant us seems largely unearned these days. And yet there it is anyway: a hand stretched out in offering, a voice saying something like keep going.

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