Station Eleven showrunner Patrick Somerville at this year’s ATX TV Festival (Image Courtesy of ATX TV Festival)
One of the stars of this year’s ATX Festival is Station Eleven showrunner Patrick Somerville. He and his team took Emily St. John Mandel’s bestselling post-apocalyptic novel and somehow made it even better in series form.
The happenstance of its pandemic plotline and multi-storyline plot make for a complex yet eminently satisfying work. Somerville, a novelist and writer for whom this was his first showrunning job, spoke to the Chronicle about his past and future projects, and what makes Station Eleven so special.
Austin Chronicle: Which of the shows you’d worked on before helped you with Station Eleven?
Patrick Somerville: All of them. I started on The Bridge. I worked for 24 after that, and then I went to The Leftovers, and I think I learned things in all of those rooms and experiences that ended up being necessary to make the story go on Station Eleven. I think it’s a literary novel, but it has stakes that are life and death, and it has mysteries in it. And The Bridge was a mystery. 24 is 24. It’s the downhill velocity of that show. It doesn’t take a lot, but you got to sprinkle that in sometimes to make your viewer sit up and say,…
