Patrick Somerville & ‘Station Eleven’ Author Emily St. John Are Developing Her Next 2 Books For HBO

While audiences and critics have rejected a lot of misguided pandemic narratives (see Doug Liman’s “Locked Down,” HBO’s Zoom-with-stars series, “Coastal Elites,” and most recently, Judd Apatow’s “The Bubble,” which has been roasted by a lot of critics, including ours), HBO Max’s “Station Eleven” mini-series about the aftermath of a global pandemic, definitely was a big exception. Leading with ideas of empathy, considering our humanity, comfort, hope, and pivoting away from dystopic darkness, the series, adapted from Emily St. John’s novel of the same name, really got it all right. While there had been some talk of “Station Eleven” showrunner/writer Patrick Somerville continuing with a sequel, it seems like he and St. John have plans to continue working again, but in a different vein.

During an in-depth conversation with The New Yorker, Mandel revealed that she, Patrick Somerville, and HBO are developing TV adaptations based on her two subsequent novels, “The Glass Hotel” and “Sea of Tranquility.” The combination of Sommerville and Mandel working together on these new projects should be welcoming news to the many fans of “Station Eleven,” even if it’s not a direct sequel.

READ MORE: ‘Station Eleven’: Writer/Creator Patrick Somerville & Producer Jessica Rhoades Talk Their Life-Affirming Global Catastrophe Series [Interview]

These projects will be Mandel’s first time writing for the screen, but it’s an expected evolution after the success of “Station Eleven.”

The books’ publisher Penguin Random House describes “The Glass Hotel as “an exhilarating novel set at the glittering intersection of two seemingly disparate events—the exposure of a massive criminal enterprise and the mysterious disappearance of a woman from a ship at sea.” They call “Sea of Tranquillity” “a novel of art, time, love, and plague that takes the reader from Vancouver Island in 1912 to a dark colony on the moon five hundred years later, unfurling a story of humanity across centuries and space.”

READ MORE: ‘Station Eleven’ TV Review: HBO Max’s Post-Apocalyptic Drama Is Essential Discomfort Viewing

Of course, this doesn’t mean a “Station Eleven” sequel or continuation is off the table. For all we know, Sommerville, Mandel, and HBO are continuing conversations about how to move the series forward and probably whether to use the same cast or tell new stories within their milieu. It wasn’t necessarily a blockbuster series for HBO Max in terms of ratings, but it did have a huge cult following that will only grow as viewers continue to catch up with it.