‘Station Eleven,’ like the Shakespeare that sustains it, is something of a miracle

“Station Eleven,” whose first three episodes premiered Thursday on HBO Max, is a post-post-apocalypse tale, set largely two decades into the future — 2040 by the series’ timeline — and also just as and some time before a flu pandemic wipes out nearly everybody on Earth. The first images in the series are of a Chicago theater overtaken by wildlife, which quickly flash back to “the present” — Christmas 2020 — where Arthur Leander, a stage actor turned movie star returning to the stage, has a heart attack while playing King Lear; and Jeevan Chaudhary, an EMT in training, goes onstage to try to help and later takes charge of Kirsten, a child actor whose caretakers have vanished. Then escape.” And, “To the monsters, we are the monsters.” And, “I have found you nine times before, maybe 10, and I’ll find you again.” In a later flashback, set earlier and picturing the meeting of Arthur and Miranda, we meet Arthur’s old friend Clark, who used to act but now works as a “CEO whisperer.” ”Civilization is a complex self-correcting mechanism,” Clark will have occasion to observe, “as complex as a person, only self-aware to a degree.” Twenty years later in a brave new world with significantly fewer people in it, Kirsten, now played by Mackenzie Davis, is a member of the Traveling Symphony, a collective of itinerant actors and musicians who perform Shakespeare to small communities in a circuit around Lake Michigan they call “The Wheel” and to which they adhere with almost superstitious rigor. But the arc of “Station Eleven,” and what might be called its extended family drama, is less “Hamlet,” with its stage of littered dead, than it is “The Winter’s Tale,” with its several reunions.