Station Eleven thriving amid a real-life pandemic is "perversely satisfying"

Vulture

"Its emergence in the winter of 2021 feels almost perfectly wrongly timed," says Hillary Kelly of the HBO Max post-apocalyptic miniseries. "Audiences are fatigued by our pandemic, fatigued by pandemic fatigue, fatigued by the idea of cultural criticism of pandemics and fatigue. This year, COVID-19 story lines wiggled into shows like The Morning Show, Law & Order, and Grey’s Anatomy, for which costume designers adapted quickly to provide transparent face coverings lest any Hollywood beauties be hidden behind paper masks. In other cases, shows like Curb Your Enthusiasm and Nine Perfect Strangers alluded to the coronavirus but didn’t envelop the season in it. There’s been so little appetite for mushing around in our current predicament — and so little quality output. Overall, COVID hasn’t exploded into a force for riveting TV. Perhaps that’s because our pandemic has often slipped into the pedestrian. School-board scuffles, desk partitions, and backed-up shipping lanes are not the stuff global catastrophe art sups on. What narrative-thirsty viewer wants to see a hundred straight weeks of people scheduling Zooms and hunting down rapid tests? Any art about right now has to reckon with the inane malaise of two years spent remembering to pack your kids’ school masks. (David Foster Wallace, baron of boredom, would likely have written the great COVID novel if he were still with us.) It is often the case that reflection and distance incubate far superior art about any contemporary crisis. Which is what makes Station Eleven so perversely satisfying. It pushes us outside of time and makes us hangers-on to its leaps across decades like slightly less daft Bill and Teds. It shuns the tidy shape of traditional disaster narratives. It abandons characters and relationships for unfathomable stretches, then snaps back to them with full, tight focus. And it often wanders cannily away from its source material (mostly to its benefit) to luxuriate in its own loose, almost groovy vibes. We can watch the absolute most dire version of what’s currently happening to us and soak in the spectacle, meta-voyeurs of a meta-commentary on how people might choose to live post-systems-collapse."