What a great time to watch a mini-series about a killer pandemic, right?

With the Omicron variant of the deadly Coronavirus just becoming such a major problem in New York that Saturday Night Live had to send home their live audience and musical guest, it really doesn’t seem an auspicious time for the debut of Station Eleven, a limited series based on the 2014 novel by Emily St. John Mandel which tells the story of a pandemic that rapidly kills off most of the population, changing the world as those survivors once knew it.

And yet, it just may be the perfect time for a series that is ultimately about survival – not just the grim, bloody survival of the fittest, but about survival of the spirit, of hope.

Adapted by show creator Patrick Somerville (The Leftovers), Station Eleven tells its story in overlaid timelines. We see the everyday world just before the virus hits, starting with a performance of King Lear in a Chicago theater where star Arthur Leander, played by Gael García Bernal, collapses and dies onstage. It weaves in the time after the pandemic has done its worst, and then jumps ahead to the world two decades later, when nature has reclaimed the world and a mysterious (but joyful) caravan of performers called the Traveling Symphony is on the road, performing Shakespeare plays for small villages around Lake Michigan, what the members of the troupe call “The Wheel.”

In the first part of the story, Kirsten (Matilda Lawler) a child actress who witnessed the on-stage death of Leander is left stranded at the theater after the performance is abruptly cancelled. She is rescued by Jeevan Chaudhary (Himesh Patel, Yesterday), a wannabe entertainment writer who was in the audience when Leander collapsed. The two stock up on supplies before seeking refuge in a high-rise condo with Jeevan’s brother Frank (Nabhaan Rizwan). These three band together to get through the first months of the pandemic, forming a small family unit.

The post-pandemic timeline shows Kirsten as an adult, played by Mackenzie Davis (Terminator), now a lead in the Traveling Symphony. When not killing it onstage as Hamlet, she’s wielding a knife offstage when anyone she cares about is threatened. And there is a threat – a sinister newcomer to the troupe, who is known only as “The Prophet” (Daniel Zovatto.) Just what he wants is unclear, but looks to be one of the central mysteries of the show.

Mandel’s novel gets its name from an in-story graphic novel called Station Eleven, which was written and illustrated by Miranda, one of the Travelling Symphony troupers.. Station Eleven’s central character is Dr. Eleven, a mysterious spaceman who lives on Station Eleven, a space station designed to resemble earth. In both the novel and the television show, the Station Eleven comic is Kirsten’s cherished possession; she carries a dog-eared copy with her everywhere and knows the text by heart. In another of the show’s mysteries, here Dr. Eleven is an actual character, seen looking down on earth from outer space.

This short-term series is already being hailed as one of the best (if not the best) new series of the year, and with good reason. The acting is extraordinary, with Scott and Patel being the early standouts in a cast that also features Lori Petty, Enrico Colantoni and Caitlin FitzGerald. The production values are stellar; movie-level cinematography on a streaming channel budget, and the direction of the first few episodes by Hiro Murai (Atlanta) and others keeps the story moving – in any timeline – at a gripping pace. And it’s impossible to say enough good things about the score by Dan Romer (Luca), which is by turns melancholy, haunting and menacing.

Station Eleven may seem like it should come with trigger warnings, given the state of the world today, but this is not a story about a pandemic: there are few scenes of people dying, though sadness and grief are acknowledged. Ultimately, this is a story about the life you live after the grief subsides, about the triumph of the human spirit and our unique ability to not just to scrape together an existence, but to bestow it with music and theater and everything else that makes life worth living.

The first three episodes are available on HBO Max now, and then the streamer will release two new episodes weekly until the final episode premieres January 10th of next year. Do not pass this one by.