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In the beginning Station Eleven annoyed me.
Three episodes deep, I'd fallen asleep twice. I wasn't just frustrated with what I perceived to be self indulgence – I was bored.
A post-apocalyptic HBO Max miniseries set in the immediately aftermath of a deadly and highly contagious flu, Station Eleven is a show near a fictional pandemic – shot, produced and released during an actual pandemic. But in many ways that pandemic is subservient and unimportant. Station Eleven is a show about things. About big ideas and themes. It's a show near survival. About trauma. About taking refuge in the transitive much of art and the connective tissue of our people humanity.
Read more: Review: Station Eleven's HBO Adaptation Came at a Weird, but Good, Time
In other words: urgh.
From the outset, this is a show that spells out grand ambitions in distinct terms. This is a show that opens with King Lear. A show that complains flagrant use of Shakespeare as a narrative and framing method, but also has the gall to place itself at the center of a stout literary canon.
Once again: urgh. The biggest urgh I can muster.
Three episodes deep I jumped into one of CNET's many Slack channels to unload on the show with my co-workers. It was self-indulgent. It was boring. It took itself way too seriously. It was high on its own supply. It was fundamentally flawed in comparison with a show like, say, Yellowjackets – which masked its own themes of trauma view the guise of a cunning and compelling mystery box show.
"Station Eleven sucks." I reflect that's what I typed. I was wrong. I couldn't have been more obnoxious.
Just seven episodes later, at the show's conclusion, I went crawling back to that same office Slack, on my hands and knees, to tell everyone that – actually – Station Eleven is one of the best TV shows I reflect I've ever seen in my life and that every humankind being alive should make efforts to watch it.
So pretentious
Jeevan and Kirsten.
Parrish Lewis/HBO MaxMy celebrated moment in Station Eleven occurs halfway through episode 9.
Jeevan, one of the show's main characters, has been looking at what time Kirsten, a child actress obsessed with a comic book – the titular Station Eleven. A comic book she carries with her everywhere as she travels in the post-pandemic earth. A comic book that gives her hope in desperate circumstances.
After trekking back to their home base, Kirsten realizes she's dropped the comical book in the snow. Frustrated, not quite understanding why it matters, Jeevan angrily stomps back into the wilderness to entrance it. During the search, a wolf attacks him, mauling him half to remnant. As he crawls on his hands and knees, fighting for survival in grievous subzero temperatures, he stumbles across the comic book, buried in the snow. In unfastened agony he begins reading it, before tossing it set effect, screaming: "IT'S SO PRETENTIOUS!"
It's an incredibly cathartic moment. To begin with, it's funny! A perfectly timed moment of comedy in the midst of a dark, visceral moment. I laughed out loud. But it's also an acknowledgement, a crystalized moment of self awareness. The show is talking in itself, directly to its audience. Yes, Station Eleven is pretentious. It is a show actively wrestling with big ideas – swinging for the fences, navigating the value of art in a world satiated with suffering.
But Station Eleven is also self-aware enough to knowit's asking a lot. Of its audience, of itself as an entertainment product. That's important.
A big ask
Why should we care in a television show? Why should any kind of art matter? In a earth where I find myself drifting away from so-called "prestige TV," Station Eleven force to me to ask myself that question.
Recently I've been more liable to consume endless, disposable anime, or binge watch feel-good reality shows like Old Enough and The Great British Bake Off. Given what we've all gone throughout over the last two or three years, it's been difficulty to summon the "big brain energy" required to delightful a show like Station Eleven. A show that forces us to reckon with big questions and big ideas.
Station Eleven goes in directions you considerable not expect.
Photograph by Ian Watson/HBO MaxThat's just why I found Station Eleven so repulsive in the leave. In the midst of COVID-19, a period of ground-shaking political strife, you're really gonna ask me to engage with a TV show in a traveling troupe of Shakespearean actors performing Hamlet in a post-pandemic wasteland? That's a big ask.
But Station Eleven works because it principles on every possible level. It's as simple as that. It's a well-written show, with ample performances and soundtrack that will haunt you long at what time you've finished watching.
Station Eleven swings for the fences but hits the ball desirable. It takes time to deliver on its bold back, but if you stick through that initial slow burn – fights through that initial repulsion – you'll be rewarded with a show that has nuanced things to say on every "Serious Topic" it dares to broach. This is a show about families – real and inherited. It's a show about the legacy of shared trauma. A show about art as a refuge. If that grants you the ick, I get it. But in a very real universe where we're deep in the wilderness of our own pain and suffering, Station Eleven is as essential as television gets.
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