Reno
The In Kraut
I finished this last night and it's so good, it deserves its own thread, Station Eleven may already be my contender for best tv drama of the year. The acclaimed novel by Emily St. John Mandel has been on my reading list but I never got round to it, so I don't know how it compares. Station Eleven takes place after a flu-like pandemic, which unlike our current one, wipes out most of humanity. The narrative moves back and forth in time from the start of the outbreak to 20 years later when its central character Kirsten, a former child actress, has become the star of a travelling theatre group, who perform Shakespeare to surviving communities.
The show features a large cast of characters, all of them compelling. Some of them die early into the pandemic but as the show keeps going back in time, they remain main characters, something the show does incredibly well and rather movingly. This makes the characters who don't survive the pandemic more than mere casualties, it gives their lives meaning which reverberates through the narrative. One of the shows biggest strengths is that it's never depressing, even considering parallels to our pandemic. It's hopeful that our capacity for creating communities and art can save us and it ends up one of the most moving TV dramas I've seen in quite some time. Thought there are deadly conflicts, the show doesn't divide people into good and evil. For a while it seems to go that way, a point of comparison would be the superficially similar The Stand but here even the most flawed and fucked up characters have the capacity to change.
The cast is outstanding, especially the two actresses who play the central character Kirsten, one as a child and one as an adult. I've been a fan of Mackenzie Davis since the 80s set show Halt and Catch Fire and she's expectedly great here. Matilda Lawler, who plays her as a child, is phenomenal, as good as any performances by a child actor I've seen. A special shout out for the costume design, especially for the Shakespeare productions the "Traveling Symphony" perform, they are great.
This is an HBO show, which is coming to Starz on Amazon at the end of January if you want to be legal about watching it.
The show features a large cast of characters, all of them compelling. Some of them die early into the pandemic but as the show keeps going back in time, they remain main characters, something the show does incredibly well and rather movingly. This makes the characters who don't survive the pandemic more than mere casualties, it gives their lives meaning which reverberates through the narrative. One of the shows biggest strengths is that it's never depressing, even considering parallels to our pandemic. It's hopeful that our capacity for creating communities and art can save us and it ends up one of the most moving TV dramas I've seen in quite some time. Thought there are deadly conflicts, the show doesn't divide people into good and evil. For a while it seems to go that way, a point of comparison would be the superficially similar The Stand but here even the most flawed and fucked up characters have the capacity to change.
The cast is outstanding, especially the two actresses who play the central character Kirsten, one as a child and one as an adult. I've been a fan of Mackenzie Davis since the 80s set show Halt and Catch Fire and she's expectedly great here. Matilda Lawler, who plays her as a child, is phenomenal, as good as any performances by a child actor I've seen. A special shout out for the costume design, especially for the Shakespeare productions the "Traveling Symphony" perform, they are great.
This is an HBO show, which is coming to Starz on Amazon at the end of January if you want to be legal about watching it.
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