Station Master

Don’t panic! Pandemic tale Station Eleven makes a timely leap to TV

- Emily St John Mandel

IT’S THE END OF THE WORLD AS we know it, and Station Eleven showrunner Patrick Somerville wants you to feel fine. Or at least more optimistic than the standard post-apocalyptic scenario.

“If eight billion people die between episodes one and two, what you owe as a storyteller for the next nine episodes is joy and life and rebuilding,” he tells Red Alert. “Let’s not investigate pain. Let’s investigate healing. That’s the only version of this kind of story that I’m interested in telling.”

Adapting Emily St John Mandel’s Clarke Award-winning novel, Station Eleven finds hope in the aftermath of global catastrophe. A lethal swine flu pandemic has devastated humanity. Now, 20 years on, the survivors fight to preserve the fragments of civilisation – while facing a dangerous and violent cult.

“I read Emily’s book when it came out in 2014,” says Somerville, a fellow author who first met Mandel two years earlier, when the pair were promoting novels together at a small bookshop in the Chicago suburbs.