A fictional television series about a global virus pandemic that was written and in production just as the real-life global virus pandemic struck? It is life imitating art, or the reverse? Whatever it is, it’s a co-incidence so improbable you’d say you couldn’t write it. Only Emily St John Mandel did. Back in 2014.
In her book Station Eleven, Mandel wrote of a world devastated by a fictional virus, the Georgia Flu, which kills much of the world’s population and triggers a breakdown of governments and institutions. At face value it seems like a disaster movie, writ large on the small pages of a book, with a very cinematic sensibility.
Gael García Bernal as Arthur Leander in Station Eleven.Credit:Stan
But Station Eleven is not quite what it seems. It isn’t a story of the miserable aftermath of a pandemic – though those plot points are certainly there – but rather, following a nomadic group of actors and musicians, including Kirsten (Mackenzie Davis) and Jeevan (Himesh Patel), it explores the way in which art becomes something of a salvation for humanity.
It is a story not of how we fall, but in a way, how we rise. That said, the television adaptation of Station Eleven will be seen largely through the prism of the continuing impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. And, bizarrely, the two found themselves travelling in parallel as the pandemic (the real-life one) took hold.
The series “was imagined, and prepped, and broken, and written and thought about without us knowing there was a pandemic on the way,” creator and executive producer Patrick Somerville says. The first and third episodes of the series were shot in January and February of 2020, before the series took a production hiatus “which became the hiatus that everyone else took,” he adds.
“We didn’t change what we were intending to do because we had already started,” Somerville says. “We always wanted to make a post-apocalyptic show about joy, and I think as we went to live it, we began to feel feelings we didn’t expect and it influenced things.”
Himesh Patel in Station Eleven, the story of a world devastated by a pandemic.Credit:Stan
The show’s director and co-executive producer Jeremy Podeswa describes the process of making a program about a fictional pandemic as a real-life one shook the world as a “very strange” experience. “The show mirrored so much that we were all going through at the time that we were making it,” he says.
“We were all grappling with this new reality, but the themes of the show were becoming so resonant as we were going forward,” Podeswa adds. “It really made us think so much about what’s important in life, which is really what the show is about. What really matters at the end of the day when you’re facing a cataclysmic kind of event?”
Predicting the pandemic: when life imitates art
Source: Philippines Alive
