How ‘Station Eleven’ Production Designer Ruth Ammon Built Her Vision of Life After the Apocalypse

If the human race were to go extinct today, what would the world look like tomorrow? In a few months? In 20 years?

The apocalypse question has given rise to a whole subgenre of television, which tends to frame it one of two ways. Stories are either forged from the wreckage of disaster-stricken cities (“The Walking Dead,” “The Stand,” “Y: The Last Man”) or set in some distant future, lightyears away from the initial cataclysm (“12 Monkeys,” “The 100”). 

“Station Eleven,” the HBO Max series based on Emily St. John Mandel’s 2014 novel, poses a simpler alternative: what if the apocalypse was just a giant reset button?

That framing – the way it collapses beginnings and endings, loss and possibility, life and death – informs every aspect of the 10-part miniseries, not least of all how it looks.