Patrick Somerville makes television out of novels, and he is unusually good at the part most adapters skip: the years between the plot points. Station Eleven is warm, strange and finely cast; it also stalls in the middle and explains itself at the end.
Fi1m perspective
The most obvious thing Patrick Somerville does is wait. In Station Eleven (2021) a flu ends the world inside the first episode, and the series then spends most of its ten hours twenty years later, walking a circuit of Lake Michigan with a theatre company doing Shakespeare. Kirsten Raymonde (Mackenzie Davis) was a child on a Chicago stage the night the flu arrived; Jeevan Chaudhary (Himesh Patel) was the stranger who walked her out. Somerville cuts between then and now, and the cuts are where the feeling lives: a small line in the present lands because we have just watched what it cost to get there.
He came to television from books. He had published four of them before he wrote on The Bridge in 2013, then 24: Live Another Day, then three years on The Leftovers (2015–2017) under Damon Lindelof, the credit that points most directly at what he has made since. Maniac (2018), made with Cary Joji Fukunaga and starring Emma Stone and Jonah Hill, was the first series he created. Station Eleven is the one he ran himself, and the one we have reviewed; it carries the weight here, and it can bear it. Since then he has co-created Made for Love (2021) and set up a production company, Tractor Beam.
His gift as an adapter is for the part of a novel that has no scenes: what people are carrying and have not said. He finds an object for it, a comic book in a pack, a stage, a stranger walking a child out of a theatre, and then trusts the actors. He has said of adaptation that "you are not re-creating the text. You are creating a harmony of the text or you’re completing the chord that the text began with," and in practice that meant moving a great deal of Emily St. John Mandel’s book about, with a writers’ room that included Cord Jefferson and Nick Cuse, and mostly to the good.
The reservations are in the same series. The Prophet (Daniel Zovatto), a soft-spoken young man with a following of children, is meant to frighten us and to be understood, and the writing circles him for several episodes without settling; the middle stretch is where we looked at the clock. Then the last episodes have characters explain in dialogue how the pieces fit, as if Somerville did not trust the cutting that had done the work until then. The finale ties its threads with a generosity we were glad of and did not wholly believe.
He is developing adaptations of two more of Mandel’s novels, The Glass Hotel and Sea of Tranquility. We would watch either. We would also ask, gently, that nobody in them explain the ending.
Biography
Patrick Somerville is an American novelist and television writer. Born in Green Bay, Wisconsin, he attended the University of Wisconsin-Madison and earned an MFA from Cornell University. He published the story collection Trouble (2006) and novels including The Cradle (2009) and This Bright River (2012).
Somerville began working in television as a writer on The Bridge (2013) and 24: Live Another Day (2014). He wrote episodes of The Leftovers (2014–2017) and created the series Maniac (2018) and Station Eleven (2021), serving as showrunner and executive producer on the latter. He received a Primetime Emmy nomination for writing on Station Eleven.
