Directors – (Episodes 1&2) Bronwen Hughes, (Episodes 3&4) Rachel Leiterman & (Episodes 5&6) Stephen S. Campanelli, Teleplay – (Episodes 1&6) Todd Komarnicki, (Episode 2&5) Karen Janszen, (Episode 3) Tony Spiridakis & (Episode 4) Evan Hart & Kylie Stephen, Created for TV by Todd Komarnicki, Based on the Novel Earth Abides (1949) by George R. Stewart, Producers – Arielle Boisvert, Ryan Silva & Shawn Williamson, Photography – Vince Arvidson, Music – Adam King, Visual Effects Supervisor – Kent O’Connor, Visual Effects – Casuarina Studios, Crafty Apes & Mr. Wolf, Makeup Effects – Werner Pretorious, Production Design – Greg Venturi. Production Company – Bright Light Pictures/Lighthouse Productions/Peak TV.
Cast
Alexander Ludwig (Isherwood ‘Ish’ Williams), Jessica Frances Dukes (Emma), Aaron Tveit (Charlie), Rodrigo Fernandez-Stoll (Jorge), Elyse Levesque (Maurine), Leah Gibson (Ann), Martin Donovan (Milton), Luisa d’Olivera (Molly), Hilary McCormack (Jean), Birkett Turton (Ezra), Aleksandra Cross (Heather), Milania Kerr (Evie 12 Yerars Old), Jenna Berman (Evie 20 Years Old), Andres Joseph (Silas), Victoria Morgan (Perry), Howie Lai (Kori)
Plot
Geologist Isherwood ‘Ish’ Williams is bitten by a rattlesnake and staggers home. In a fever as the venom passes through his system, he misses an evacuation that comes. He comes around days later to find that a virus has swept through the entire population, killing everybody. Ish settles in in his home in San Lupo near San Francisco on his own, gathering supplies and trying to learn a means of survival. He later discovers another survivor Emma living nearby. The two connect and become lovers, giving birth to several children. Over the years, others are found and a community built where they create many means of survival. However, a problem comes when the local dam is emptied in a drought. Then comes the dangerous and charismatic Charlie and his entourage who tour survival areas offering to drill for water.
Earth Abides (1949) was one of the novels from George R. Stewart (1895-1980), who was a professor in the English department at Berkeley for many years. It wasn’t the first work on the subject by any means but the book has since become regarded as a classic work that has defined the Post-Apocalyptic genre. It has been enormously influential – Stephen King cites it as one of his inspirations for The Stand (1978). The very knowledgeable The Encyclopaedia of Science-Fiction (1992) cites it as “one of the finest of all post-holocaust novels.” This was a TV Mini-Series adaptation of Earth Abides in six episodes of around 50 minutes each that aired on the MGM+ streaming channel.
The mini-series updates the book in many ways. The plague that killed everybody off neatly slots into this being another Plague and Pandemic work where the filmmakers readily draw imagery from the recent Covid-19 pandemic. Gone are most of the religious themes that ran through the book – there is the odd reference to Ecclesiastes and a single scene in Episode 5 where Alexander Ludwig seems to get religion. There is less the sense that we get in the novel of Ish being aware that his children have forgotten everything of civilisation around them and mourning the passing away of the previous world.
Certainly, the Earth Abides mini-series is refreshingly laidback and pastoral in comparison to other filmed post-apocalyptic works. One only need compare it to the revved-up post-apocalyptic road races of Mad Max 2 (1981) and its vast body of action imitators and in more recent years works like The Road (2009) and its depiction of the future as an overwhelmingly bleak world where humanity is reduced to scrabbling for even basic necessities. The nearest equivalent to what we have here is the much superior British tv series Survivors (1975-7), which focused around a small community of the survivors of a pandemic and the struggles to eke out a subsistence.
Alexander Ludwig as Isherwood ‘Ish’ Williams in the ruins of civilisation
The better parts of Earth Abides are when the mini-series focuses on the practicalities of survival. At the end of the first episode, we see Alexander Ludwig doing the one thing that almost nobody does in a post-apocalyptic work – gathering a bunch of books from the library on how to do things. And in the second episode, we see him trying to deal with some of the more practical aspects of survival – installing solar panels on the roof, the problems of how to shoot and dress a cow and reading up on books about midwifery when Jessica Frances Duke gives birth.
My major issue with Earth Abides is the lack of particularly interesting characters. With impressively Viking physique, former child actor Alexander Ludwig looks like a poor man’s Alexander Skarsgård, but his character is largely a cardboard cutout where the only real expression Ludwig ever offers is the tightening of his jaw. Despite the mini-series’ timespan taking place over more than twenty years, Ludwig never seems to age beyond the 32 years he is in real-life until the last scene of the film. Jessica Frances Duke makes for a much more lively other half.
The other issue is how the book has been changed to fit modern sensibilities. Where George R. Stewart had an elegiac mourning of the loss of the past in the book, the mini-series seems to completely reverse these sympathies and celebrates the passing of the old world and a return to nature. It offers a vision of post-apocalyptic survival that is very much tied to contemporary celebrations of diversity and equality – everybody in the community of survivors is partnered with someone from a different ethnic group, including a triad, and where the only real threat encountered is a male sexual predator. This sense of eliminating the past and celebrating a new more equal society is best expressed in a scene where both Alexander Ludwig and Jessica Frances Duke seem readily willing to countenance burning a library (a scene that makes this feel more like a horror story). Later Ludwig comes to the realisation, “All the while I have been trying to take the lesson from the past to recreate the world we had,” ie. the past is something that should be abandoned. The ending opts for the black-and-white simplicity that seems to regard everything as a much better place now the whole world is gone (at least surely until the point one of them needs medical help or pharmaceuticals) – a theme that is the exact opposite of the one in George R. Stewart’s book.
