Damon Lindelof and Tom Perrotta
HBO
IT IS a strange time to watch The Leftovers, which premiered on HBO 10 years ago this month. The series opens three years after the Sudden Departure, when about 140 million people (close to 2 per cent of Earth鈥檚 population) just disappeared. Those left are still grappling with why and how to move on from such loss.
In the real world, it has been about three years since the last covid-19 lockdown lifted in the UK and many other countries. This was commonly seen as a return to some form of normality. We are now at a similar remove from the peak of our crisis as police chief Kevin Garvey (Justin Theroux) is from the Sudden Departure.
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But Kevin鈥檚 life is far from normal. He sees things that may not be real, like a stranger shooting packs of rabid dogs, and blacks out for long stretches. His wife Laurie (Amy Brenneman) has joined the Guilty Remnant, a cult seeking to prevent people from making peace with the tragedy, while his son Tom (Chris Zylka) follows Holy Wayne (Paterson Joseph), who claims to be able to remove people鈥檚 pain entirely. His daughter Jill (Margaret Qualley) is one more fatalistic teenager in the crowd.
While the Garveys are relatively untouched by the Sudden Departure, one woman, Nora Durst (Carrie Coon), is deified in their town because her husband and children all disappeared. The Garveys are, however, still scarred by living in a world where the rules can be rewritten at a moment鈥檚 notice, where people they love can be ripped from them in ways that seem to defy logic.
The Sudden Departure was instant, random and had a far greater toll than the pandemic. But like the Garveys, many of us are still unable to fully reckon with the world our own crisis has left us in. How often do you think about covid-19 or the 7 million people it has killed? Is lingering on such thoughts the rational response to a disaster that could happen again or a maladaptive impulse that prevents society from moving forward? Is it even possible to find a middle ground?
Such questions filled 快猫短视频 in the first couple of years of the pandemic. In that sense, watching The Leftovers could hardly be more timely as we consider how to acclimatise to pain and ruin, be it mass trauma or environmental degradation. And it is full of other questions that define our times: what drives us to extremism? Why does religious faith persist? And what happens when science seems to fail us, however temporarily?
Artistically, The Leftovers deserves your attention because it represents the peak of a golden age of television, an era sadly ended. It is everything we now revere about prestige TV: it is beautifully acted, written and scored, and it explores complex moral and existential ideas.
But the show also takes big risks: it is brilliantly ambitious and surreal, unwilling to talk down to its audience or provide easy answers. It plays with solving its central mystery, but largely resists explanations, unlike the countless 鈥減uzzle box鈥� TV shows inviting viewers to predict finales, typically with disappointing results.
The Leftovers is television of the body, not the brain. It isn鈥檛 an unintelligent series, far from it, but it invites you to feel before you think 鈥� a valuable and cathartic thing. If you can handle revisiting the lessons of the past few years 鈥� or just want great TV 鈥� I advise you to sit with the show and bear its full, terrible weight for a while.
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Nobody does it better than David Lynch. Twenty-five years after the original series ended, this revival gave us more fantastically unsettling imagery to dissect.
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Before The Leftovers, writer Damon Lindelof co-created the ultimate mystery series. For all its faults, Lost is as engaging and emotional in 2024 as it ever was.
