For Fans of Pandemics

Steven Soderbergh and screenwriter Scott Burns made Contagion in 2011 as a procedural, not a thriller. There is no rogue scientist with a cure hidden in a safe. There is no hero who outruns the virus on foot. There is a modeler at the CDC running R0 numbers and an epidemiologist who gets on a plane to Hong Kong. The film's emotional power comes from its restraint: grief arrives in a single shot of a body bag, not a monologue. When 2020 arrived, Contagion was the most-downloaded film on streaming platforms for a reason. It had already shown us exactly what a real pandemic looks like, and we had not been paying attention.

Stephen King wrote The Stand at the height of his powers in 1978, and the book still sets the standard for the genre. The pandemic itself, a weaponized flu called Captain Trips, is almost perfunctory: it kills 99.4 percent of the population in a few hundred pages. What King spends the remaining 1,000 pages on is what comes after, how the survivors choose sides, build communities, make moral errors, and eventually have to fight for the shape of whatever civilization replaces the old one. The 1994 miniseries adaptation holds up; the 2020 CBS All Access version, despite a stronger cast in places, never found the novel's dread.

Naughty Dog's The Last of Us succeeded where most outbreak games fail by making the infection almost incidental to the emotional story. The Cordyceps fungus is a real genus; the game's extrapolation of it jumping to humans is scientifically grounded enough to feel plausible. But the game's actual subject is the cost of love in a world where resources are zero-sum. Joel's choice at the end of the first game is one of the most argued-over decisions in the medium's history, and the HBO adaptation with Pedro Pascal deepened it further by giving Joel more time to rebuild himself before the ending collapses him again.

Emily St. John Mandel's novel and the HBO Max series adaptation both make an unfashionable argument: that art is not a luxury, it is what makes survival worth the effort. Set mostly 20 years after a flu called the Georgia Flu kills most of humanity, Station Eleven follows a traveling Shakespeare company performing for small settlements. The choice to focus on theater, on the Shakespearean line 'survival is insufficient,' positions this as a counter-argument to every grimdark post-apocalypse. The series, developed by Patrick Somerville, is one of the best television adaptations of a literary novel in recent memory.