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The Station Eleven gang: has the pandemic given us a thirst for culture that’s out of our comfort zone?

Around the early days of the pandemic, I joined the many readers who devoured Station Eleven, Emily St John Mandel’s novel, which begins with a quick-spreading global virus that ends up wiping out the bulk of humanity. It was a hit when it was first published in 2014, but it experienced a boost in sales, much to the surprise of its author. “I don’t know who in their right mind would want to read Station Eleven during a pandemic,” she said.

Now it has been turned into a television series, starring Himesh Patel and Mackenzie Davies, among many others. The trailer, released last week, begins with a scene in which Patel’s character stocks up on food and water in an already deserted supermarket. “Is this because of that thing?” asks a stunned checkout worker in a Santa hat.

I wondered whether, at this stage of the pandemic – hard months ahead in the UK, according to Jonathan Van-Tam, our own Santa hat looking perilously askew – the thought of watching a drama about a virus that brings about the apocalypse still held any appeal.

After the initial flurry of Zoom-based dramas and phone-shot one-offs that appeared at the very start of lockdown, there have been a couple of attempts to directly reckon with the pandemic on British television. Dennis Kelly’s Together followed Sharon Horgan and James McAvoy through the horrifying thick of it; Jodie Comer and Stephen Graham took on the care home disaster in Jack Thorne’s devastating Help. I found that deciding to watch them required a degree of steeling oneself beforehand. It felt unfamiliar, to have to work up to watching a drama and, ultimately, both were upsetting and infuriating, as they intended to be. They asked for endurance and rewarded it. Maybe reward isn’t quite right. But they asked for more from the audience and they got it.

In New York, the Metropolitan Opera is currently staging Wagner’s Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, which is almost six hours long. “There is always an appeal for huge events,” its general manager, Peter Gelb, told the New York Times. It is certainly bold of him to put on its longest opera during a pandemic while many theatres are considering shorter plays with no intervals, to get bums back on seats. Whether the risk will pay off remains to be seen. But I wonder if we will emerge from this, when we eventually do, with a different kind of resilience and an appetite for art and culture that asks more of us. Station Eleven is a brilliant story and has the potential to be an outstanding series, if we have the strength to look.

Lady Gaga: suffering for art has gone too far

Lady Gaga
Lady Gaga: living in character. Photograph: Christopher Polk/REX/Shutterstock

Lady Gaga, who plays Patrizia Reggiani in the Ridley Scott-directed, eagerly awaited, knitwear-advocacy fashion biopic House of Gucci, gave a fantastically freewheeling interview to British Vogue about her role.

“I lived as [Reggiani] for a year and a half,” she said, “and I spoke with an accent for nine months of that.” (Oh to have overheard her ordering a cup of tea at the local cafe.) She said that towards the end of the shoot she had “some psychological difficulty” as a result; she went for a walk, she explained, and thought she was on a movie set.

I have met actors who go full method, to the extent that they will only speak in their character’s accent and, often, it is hard to keep a straight face when witnessing it. I have never before encountered a woman who does it; it always struck me as self-indulgent and commitment-free to check out of real life for such an extended period of time.

Despite the thespy, airy-fairy comedy factor, though, it speaks to a bleak fantasy of performance or art requiring suffering to seem real and surely not even a fabulous film should require that.

Steve Buscemi was a Halloween treat for all his fellow kids

Steve Buscemi: setting a high bar.
Steve Buscemi: setting a high bar. Photograph: NBC

Mariah Carey marked the end of Halloween as only she could, releasing a video of herself with a candy-cane-striped baseball bat, pulverising a pumpkin as the bells of All I Want for Christmas begin to chime.

There is a brief window in which a Halloween postmortem is acceptable. Evaluating celebrity Halloween costumes is on a par with watching the most prestigious red-carpet events. It’s better than a gown or a tux because it’s a window into that person’s psyche or at least into the psyche of the assistant they paid to create the look for them.

This year has been a self-referential one. The most intriguing trend was well-known people dressing as themselves. I like it. It is, at least, eco-friendly, preferring recycling over panic-purchasing a flimsy plastic skull mask. Cast your minds back to 2011, when Sophia Grace and Rosie, two tiny children from Essex, became world famous after a shaky clip of them performing Nicki Minaj’s Super Bass in tutus went viral and got them on The Ellen Show. Now, 10 years later, at 15 and 18, they’ve gone (mildly) viral again, for dressing as themselves in their viral days.

But king of the costumes was Steve Buscemi, who not only dressed as himself, but as a meme of himself. His line, “How do you do, fellow kids?”, from 30 Rock, is an internet classic and he reportedly recreated the look for his neighbours in Brooklyn, complete with backwards baseball cap and “Music Band” T-shirt. It sets a high bar for next year.

• Rebecca Nicholson is an Observer columnist