Patrick Somerville’s ten-part adaptation of Emily St. John Mandel’s novel is a plague story about who you end up with when the lights go out. Warm, strange and finely cast, it stalls in its middle stretch and lets itself off too lightly at the end.
Most stories about the end of the world are about the end. Patrick Somerville’s ten-part adaptation of Emily St. John Mandel’s novel is about the twenty years after, and it spends most of its time with a travelling theatre company doing Shakespeare. Kirsten Raymonde (Mackenzie Davis) was a child on a Chicago stage the night a flu arrived; two decades on she is the Symphony’s leading actor, walking a circuit around Lake Michigan with a comic book in her pack. Somerville cuts between then and now, and between her and Jeevan Chaudhary (Himesh Patel), the stranger who walked her out of the theatre. It is a fine piece of television; we will get to where it falters.
The first episode, directed by Hiro Murai, is the best hour of it. Arthur Leander (Gael García Bernal) dies on stage during King Lear, Jeevan climbs up to help and is no help at all, and he ends up outside in the snow with a small girl and nobody to hand her to. Murai holds on Patel’s face while a phone call from his sister tells him what is filling the hospitals, and the city behind him carries on not knowing. Then they push a train of trolleys through a supermarket, and we realised we were frightened by a man buying tinned soup. Matilda Lawler, as the young Kirsten, plays a child who has decided to be fine, and lets us see what that costs her.
The episodes set in the high-rise flat of Jeevan’s brother Frank (Nabhaan Rizwan) moved us more than anything else here. Three people shut in above a frozen city, the windows in the towers opposite going dark one by one, a child writing a play because there is nothing else to do. Ruth Ammon’s production design fills the rooms with the clutter of a life that stopped mid-sentence, and Dan Romer’s score, sparing and mostly on piano, waits and then arrives quietly. We will not say how that winter ends. Rizwan, with the least showy part in the cast, is the one we keep thinking about.
Twenty years on, the colour comes back. Helen Huang dresses the Symphony in what two decades of scavenging turns up, sequins over fleece and ballgowns over walking boots. Lori Petty’s Conductor runs the troupe with bullying and love and gets most of the laughs. Philippine Velge is Alexandra, the youngest member, too young to remember a before and impatient with everyone who does. David Wilmot’s Clark Thompson, an old friend of Arthur’s, is running a settlement in an airport where a planeload of passengers landed on the first day and never left. Wilmot plays a decent man slowly discovering how much he enjoys being in charge.
What does not work is the Prophet (Daniel Zovatto), a soft-spoken young man with a following of children who keeps crossing the Symphony’s road. The series wants him to frighten us and also to be understood, and Zovatto does what he can, but the writing around him circles for several episodes without settling. The middle stretch is where we looked at the clock. Somerville and his writers, among them Cord Jefferson and Nick Cuse, have moved a great deal of the novel about, mostly to the good, and then in the last episodes have characters explain in dialogue how the pieces fit. The finale ties its threads with a generosity we were glad of and did not wholly believe.
Against the rest of its genre it is unusual in being kind. Nobody is eaten. The worst people in it are frightened rather than wicked, and the show is more interested in what people carried out of the old world, a comic, a play, a phone with a dead battery, than in how the old world fell. The other directors, Jeremy Podeswa, Lucy Tcherniak and Helen Shaver, keep to Murai’s low winter sun and long lenses, so the ten hours look like the work of one hand.
It carries an 18 certificate, for a handful of sudden violent moments rather than anything sustained. Watch it two episodes at a time; the jumps in time make more sense with a night’s sleep between them.
