William Shakespeare Meets Cormac McCarthy In HBO’s 10-Part Dystopian Masterpiece

Cormac McCarthy's gritty storytelling meets William Shakespeare's timeless writing in HBO's masterpiece dystopian show with 10 episodes. William Shakespeare and Cormac McCarthy are often considered two of the greatest writers in the history of the English language. Shakespeare's legacy and influence are undeniable, while some of McCarthy's best novels include No Country for Old Men, The Road, and Blood Meridian, which has been cited as one of the greatest American novels ever written.

While Shakespeare and McCarthy are both legendary writers, their styles differ significantly. Shakespeare, of course, is known for his iambic pentameter and beautiful, humorous, and flowery plays and poems. McCarthy, on the other hand, writes brutally violent and grim novels that often emphasize simplicity over wordplay. Combining the two writing styles together shouldn't work at all.

HBO, however, has a 10-episode miniseries that combines the styles of McCarthy and Shakespeare together perfectly. Station Eleven, based on the novel of the same name by Emily St. John Mandel, is a modern masterpiece that perfectly toes the line between McCarthy's gritty dystopian fiction and Shakespeare's timeless wit and poetry. Set in a world devastated by a pandemic that sends them back to the Stone Age, Station Eleven is one of the best shows on HBO Max.

Station Eleven Is A Great Dystopian Thriller Like Cormac McCarthy’s The Road

Station Eleven bears immediate similarities to one of Cormac McCarthy's most famous books, The Road. Both are set in post-apocalyptic dystopias where humanity has been forced to regress to the pre-Industrial Revolution era. Whereas The Road doesn't explain its apocalyptic event, Station Eleven explains that a pandemic wiped out the vast majority of humanity's population. The result is the same: the few survivors are forced to scavenge and hunt for food without any of the amenities of modern life.

The Road and Station Eleven also take the same bleak approach to their dystopias. The Road obviously goes much further into the savage and brutal nature of mankind through cannibal raiders, but Station Eleven also has its own bands of roving raiders and Tyler, who leads a cult made up of lost children. Both stories have unforgiving worlds populated by people who are more than willing to get their hands dirty to survive.

Both stories also have similar but distinctly different plots. The Road focuses on the man and his son struggling to traverse hostile territory and brutal conditions as they journey South for the winter. Station Eleven focuses, partially, on the Traveling Symphony trying to navigate similarly dangerous territory in search of lost members of their party. In short, if you like Cormac McCarthy for his bleak and gritty writing like in The Road, you're going to like Station Eleven.

Station Eleven Also Heavily Incorporates The Work Of William Shakespeare

For all the bleakness of its dystopia, Station Eleven also heavily incorporates the works of William Shakespeare. The Traveling Symphony in Station Eleven makes a living by traveling across the ruins of America and performing Shakespeare's plays, namely Hamlet. Before the pandemic, Station Eleven also heavily focuses on Arthur Leander as he prepares and performs King Lear. As such, scenes and lines from both of those plays have a big role in the show.

Station Eleven is a story that is deeply in love with Shakespeare's writings. It has plenty to say about the enduring nature of his works, as the Symphony learns that survivors want to see his plays performed more than any other contemporary movie, show, or musical. A main theme of the story is the idea that people might miss things they take for granted in a post-apocalypse, and Shakespeare is chief among those oft-overlooked creature comforts.

The broader story of Station Eleven also takes inspiration from Shakespeare, to an extent. The entire show is about people who are linked together through something like destiny and distant connections to Arthur Leander and the Station Eleven comic book. Unavoidable fate, missed connections, and mistaken identities are all traits that define Shakespeare's tragedies and comedies, and they also define Station Eleven.

Station Eleven also takes tonal cues from Shakespeare. It obviously has many of the tragic elements that defined Shakespeare's tragedies like Romeo & Juliet, but it also has humor, whimsy, romance, and a surprisingly hopeful outlook on the future. Station Eleven is a lot of different, sometimes contradictory, things all at once, which is one of the many qualities that made William Shakespeare so enduring.