10 Canadians who helped make Yellowjackets and Station Eleven the zeitgeist shows of this strange moment
Beyond being shot here, both shows are extremely Canadian on both sides of the camera
It's really quite something that as we settled into a holiday season that was completely disrupted by the Omicron variant, two of the TV shows it seemed all of us were watching to distract ourselves were about a group of teenagers resorting to cannibalism after their plane crashes in the woods ... and a not-too-distant future where a flu-like virus has killed off most of the world's population.
Perhaps we're at the point where those scenarios are oddly comforting in a "well, at least our existence isn't this bad" kinda way. Or more likely, it's just that those two series — Showtime's Yellowjackets and HBO Max's Station Eleven (both streaming on Crave in Canada) — are so exceptionally well-made and well-acted that we could not ignore them despite their grim content. And we have a pretty staggering amount of Canadians to thank for that.
Very briefly (because if you're unaware of these shows, you should probably stop reading this and watch them), Yellowjackets is the one about the cannibalistic teens, and Station Eleven is the one about the pandemic much worse than the one we're living through. The shows are exceptionally more than their loglines, each moving back and forth between multiple timelines as they explore how their characters persevered through two very different catastrophic events. And like seemingly half the American television that has come out during the pandemic, both were shot in Canada.
For Yellowjackets, the Vancouver area stands in for both suburban New Jersey and — in a bit of a twist — northern Ontario (has one area of Canada ever subbed for another on American TV before?). For Station Eleven, Oshawa and Mississauga, Ont., collectively play pre- and post-apocalyptic Chicago and surrounding area. But the Canadian connections hardly stop there. Both shows are stacked with Canadian talent on both sides of the camera, and in honour of their finales this week, we thought we'd run down 10 noteworthy examples.
Prince Amponsah
In Station Eleven, Ghanaian-born, Mississauga-raised actor Amponsah plays August, a member of the Travelling Symphony theatre troupe — which is fitting, given he's likely best known for his work onstage, playing lead roles in Veritas Theatre's 2017 production Sheets and Soulpepper's 2018 play After the Blackout (among many others). Last year, he acted in Emmett, Syrus Marcus Ware's contribution to CBC Arts' filmed theatre project, 21 Black Futures. Notably, his experience surviving a near-fatal fire in 2012 was the subject of the CBC doc Prince's Tale, which won best Canadian short film at the 2018 Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival.
Deborah Cox
Beyond being well-known around the world as Canada's queen of R & B (at least to anyone who was gay in 1998), Cox has been acting since the early 2000s both in film and onstage. Her film debut was the 2000 drama Love Come Down, while in 2004 she made it to Broadway with the title role in Aida. Alongside Amponsah in Station Eleven, she plays Wendy, another member of the Travelling Symphony. The Travelling Symphony — which you'll soon see is extremely Canadian — is a band of actors and musicians who perform Shakespeare to the settlements that have cropped up in the post-apocalypse.
Mackenzie Davis
The star of the Travelling Symphony — and the protagonist of Station Eleven — is Kirsten, a woman the show follows from childhood at the onset of the pandemic to young adulthood as an after times actress. In the latter timeline, she's portrayed by the Vancouver-born Davis, who has been making quite a name for herself in the past decade or so. From Halt and Catch Fire to the "San Junipero" episode of Black Mirror and a lead role opposite Kristen Stewart in the 2020 romantic comedy Happiest Season, Davis is one of our most sought-after exports. In Station Eleven, she makes it very clear why, as she guides viewers through the apocalypse with a layered, thoughtful performance.
Emily St. John Mandel
There would be no series version of Station Eleven without the award-winning book it was based on, which also came to us via a great Canadian. The B.C.-born writer Mandel published the book of the same name in 2014, eerily foreshadowing the pandemic we'd all face six years later (though thankfully, ours wasn't quite as severe). The novel — which, unlike the series, is partially set in Toronto — has sold over 1.5 million copies and won Mandel both the Arthur C. Clarke Award and the Toronto Book Award. It was optioned to become a film in 2015, which eventually evolved into plans for a miniseries in 2019.
Andy McQueen
Our final (in alphabetical order) member of the Station Eleven Travelling Symphony is rising star McQueen. He plays Sayid in the series, which is just one of an extraordinary number of projects the Toronto-based actor has appeared in over the past five years. On TV, there's been The Girlfriend Experience, Fahrenheit 451, The Handmaid's Tale and CBC's own Coroner, while on film his work includes Brown Girl Begins, Disappearance at Clifton Hill (for which he was nominated for a Canadian Screen Award) and The Death Doula (which just so happens to be co-directed by two members of the CBC Arts family, Amanda Parris and Lucius Dechausay).
Deepa Mehta and Jamie Travis
Moving over to team Yellowjackets, two of this season's episodes were directed by notable Canadians Mehta and Travis. Travis — best known for the film For a Good Time, Call... and work on shows like Faking It and Claws (both of which are deeply underrated) — directed the second episode ("F Sharp") and co-executive produced the entire series. Mehta, meanwhile, was behind the camera for the fourth episode ("Bear Down"). While she is primarily known for directing films (the Oscar-nominated Water, Midnight's Children, Funny Boy), this was not her first try at television. In the early 1990s, she directed multiple episodes of The Adventures of Young Indiana Jones, and in 2020, contributed an episode to Kumail Nanjiani's Apple TV+ series Little America.
Sophie Nélisse
One of the most extraordinary things about Yellowjackets is just how perfect the casting is for the two timelines. It's wildy easy to believe that each of the teenage girls grew up to be their adult counterparts, which is a testament to both the casting directors and the actresses. That's certainly true of the pair that co-play the show's arguable protagonist, Shauna (Yellowjackets is the definition of an ensemble show, but Shauna definitely gets the most screen time). The glory that is Melanie Lynskey plays her as an adult, but young Canadian actress Sophie Nélisse more than holds her own as the younger Shauna. The 21-year-old broke out in 2011 with her Genie Award-winning performance in the Quebec hit Monsieur Lazhar, but with Yellowjackets, she is poised to rise to a whole other level.
Jeremy Podeswa and Helen Shaver
Six of Station Eleven's 10 episodes were directed by Canadians: three by Shaver and three by Podeswa (including this week's finale). Both directors came to the series with a considerable wealth of experience in TV, which certainly shows in how expertly crafted their episodes are (particularly Shaver's "Survival is Insufficient" and Podeswa's "Dr. Chaudhary"). Just a few of Podeswa's credits (which have earned him four Emmy nominations) include Six Feet Under, Weeds, Boardwalk Empire, The Walking Dead, Game of Thrones and The Handmaid's Tale. Shaver — who spent more than two decades acting before trying her hand behind the camera in her late 40s — has worked on Anne with an E, Orphan Black, Snowpiercer, Lovecraft Country and Westworld.
You can watch the finales of Station Eleven (Thursday) and Yellowjackets (Sunday) this week, both streaming on Crave. In the meantime, you can also enjoy this interview CBC Arts host Amanda Parris did with Helen Shaver back in 2019:
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