Comparison: Does the Station Eleven miniseries live up to the book?

COVID-19 has changed the world forever, whether it’s in the form of our lives or the art we enjoy. When Emily St John Mandel wrote Station Eleven in 2014, the concept of a world-altering flu was a simple what-if. After the pandemic hit in 2020, making a miniseries out of the book seemed like an obvious move.

Miniseries have taken the place of movies for many book adaptations, which gives the stories more time to breathe, but it can also mean if it isn’t a good representation, that you’re going to waste even more of your time if you plan to watch it.

So, is the Station Eleven miniseries a good adaptation, worthy of your ten hours? The short answer is yes. It’s an emotionally devastating series with fantastic acting and one of the coolest soundtracks of any show from the last decade. Whether you’ve read the book or it’s on your TBR (no shame if you skip to the show first), it’s well worth a watch, and at ten episodes long, it’s very much binge-able. 

Still, if you’ve read a book, a great adaptation doesn’t forgive certain changes and choices. One person’s great miniseries might be another’s ultimate artistic betrayal. In the case of Station Eleven, the changes from book to show are major and many.

In the years since Station Eleven’s publication, we’ve become a more equal, more aware world. Don’t get me wrong, we have a long way to go until we get proper equality for minorities, disabled people, women, and people of color. However, it is nice to see how much a story like Station Eleven has grown and changed in just seven years. Emily St John Mandel’s novel was already female-centric, with a gay central character and many races of protagonists. The show was able to build on this. It fleshed out the story and character of Elizabeth, making her less of a villain and much less vapid and foolish. It built a female best-friendship-with-parental-undertones by giving a close female friend in Alex, rather than August, her close friend in the novel. This not only gave us a glimpse into female friendships post-plague but made Kirsten’s friendship with her more than crush-based. We got to see a number of female characters who were already great, like the Conductor and Miranda, either follow a fantastic path that Mandel already laid out for them, or become more important and take center stage.

Speaking of Miranda, she is played by Danielle Deadwyler, a Black actress, rather than being white like many of our protagonists already are. It was refreshing to see this artistic, charming businesswoman portrayed by a person of color. It was a change made for the show, and when we think of an artist and a businesswoman, we might not always assume they are non-white.

So often in TV shows, it can be difficult to properly represent physically disabled people, whether it’s due to a shortage of actors and actresses who fit the part, the fact that a character may become physically disabled, or simply due to the fact that a network does not want to make people uncomfortable by putting a disability on display. Station Eleven’s TV adaptation did not shy away and, in a world where many characters have been maimed by their new circumstances, decided to cast actor Prince Amponsah, who lost his arms in a Toronto apartment fire. They didn’t give a backstory to the missing limbs; they didn’t try to explain it away. Just like in real life, these things happen. Striving for that representation, and not acting like it has to be dramatic, is something to respect about the Station Eleven miniseries.

Any good TV show needs drama. And yet, something I praised — in fact, I downright worshiped it — was Mandel’s ability to underwhelm me in ways that worked. The final battle wasn’t much of a fight, because there’s no such thing as prophets. There was this underlying sense that Station Eleven was a sci-fi until you thought about it and realized it wasn’t quite. There wasn’t actually a whole lot of drama for the survivors; the real drama was in the world before the pandemic.

The miniseries, in comparison, is an absolute thrill ride. There were so many moments I was on the edge of my seat. So many characters who made it through the book died in the show, and people were at each other’s throats more often. Like my personal favorite character Clark, who in the book rebuilds history, is stoic in making tough decisions, and is sorry he ever signed emails with “thx” rather than “thanks,” is transformed to be snippy and quick to make harsh decisions, burdened by his guilt and not as sagely as the man I loved to read about. These decisions make for a fun show and I ultimately know they helped make it as enjoyable as it is, but if you’re looking for something as melancholy and mellow as the novel, you will not find it in the series.

As I said, when it comes to film adaptations, one person’s awesome is another person’s woe. It won’t matter to every viewer that they took out a lot of the novel’s Canadiana, but it certainly bummed me out, particularly since the book starts out in my home city of Toronto. I live with the constant assumption that New Yorkers take for granted knowing every road, coffee shop, and statue a person hears about in most movies and books, and it was nice knowing the name of the theater Arthur dies in, following Jeevan and Kirsten down roads I’ve walked down myself. Much as I appreciated a largely Canadian cast (let’s be honest if Mackenzie Davis is in it, it’s either going to be Canadian or strongly LGBTQ) and a lot of nods to Canadian things, I’ll admit that I wish Mandel had been a diva about needing her home country to still be a central part of the story.

It’s always interesting to compare a book to its TV adaptation, especially when you’ve lived through the ordeals the characters go through. It’s amazing how much Emily St John Mandel got right about pandemics, but there’s nothing quite like living through the situation. People and moments I didn’t weep about when reading the book destroyed me in the show, all because so much more had happened to me. I read Station Eleven in an afternoon, and I also watched Station Eleven in record time (it was ten episodes in a month, but for a busy writer who also works a full-time job and busks, that’s efficient!). Both the book and the series are easy to recommend, though for very different reasons.

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