![]() ![]() ![]() The Happily Ever Aftermath of the Pandemic ![]() There’s definitely a relationship between what we were feeling in those months and what we ended up writing for Nine. I remember in those first scary months - April, May, June - I was taking the draft we had from our writers room, and the baby-pocalypse idea was maybe burbling and percolating around, and I decided to go all-in on that. It’s a tricky mogul run there, story-wise. We had to put enough impediments between him and her to make him buy into something else. There were some very difficult story maneuvers that we figured out, because no one was ever going to believe that Jeevan wasn’t going to do everything in his power to get back to Kirsten once they were separated. I had always pitched Nine, when it didn’t exist, as “Jeevan’s Revenant,” but our version of that. We were already making all roads converge at the airport, and we knew that Kirsten and Jeevan would reunite in Ten. The one that really changed was Episode Nine, where Jeevan helps deliver all the babies. Something was coming that was going to shut stuff down for a while.īecause you had that time off in between making those two episodes and the rest, did the storytelling change at all as a result of what you were seeing on the news? By the time we wrapped around February 20, it was starting to feel like we got real lucky to get those in. I asked, “Why are you giving me these?” He said, “Because you’re flying?” I said, “What, that thing?” He said, “Yeah, you should wear them.” I said, “I’m not wearing these.” I had the strange experience watching Episode One again where the guy in the grocery store says, “Should I go somewhere? Because of that thing?” And I was that guy! When you’re showrunning, you’re so underwater and unable to process things happening out in the world. Then we were filming one of the last scenes of that block in Chicago before I had to fly back to L.A., and our props guy came and handed me two KN95 masks from the shoot. I remember news reports at one point saying Americans probably wouldn’t have to worry about it. Different members of the company had a different sensitivity on their radar to it. How aware were you at the time that Covid was coming? You filmed your first episodes, which turned out to be the first and third, in January and February of 2020. Somerville spoke with Rolling Stone about the entire season - which means there are full spoilers for all 10 episodes here - including what it was like to have it come out during the rise of the Omicron variant, the nonlinear storytelling, the finale’s crucial reunion, and more. It’s a tremendous show, whose finale is out now. But it’s done it in a way that has proved surprisingly cathartic - and, yes, joyful - to viewers willing to travel through Somerville and director Hiro Murai’s vision of post-virus life as it streamed on HBO Max over the last two months. So the long-in-gestation screen adaptation (which Somerville began working on in 2018, after attempts to make a movie failed) very much touches the third rail of what we’ve all been struggling with over the last two years. But unlike on traditional postapocalyptic dramas The Walking Dead or The Stand, the survivors mostly get along with one another, and the focus is on an acting troupe called the Traveling Symphony - whose star, Kirsten (Mackenzie Davis), is our central character - performing Shakespeare plays for communities in the Midwest. It’s a world mostly without electricity and the other creature comforts of the reality we know. John Mandel’s 2015 novel takes place 20 years after a particularly nasty flu strain has wiped out 99 percent of the world’s population. Somerville’s largely faithful adaptation of Emily St. Long before anyone had heard about Covid-19, Patrick Somerville was pitching Station Eleven as “a postapocalyptic show about joy.” ![]()
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