You Should Watch The Leftovers Now
Spoiler alert, for an almost decade-old show
Around this time last year my wife and I binge-watched1 The Leftovers on HBO Max. I started it when it came out in 2014 but don’t think I even finished Season One. I remember liking it fine (what’s not to like about Justin Theroux in sweatpants?), but I guess I wasn’t enthralled, given the falling off.
Fast-forward eight years—pausing briefly at six and seven to take in the worldwide catastrophe resulting in the effective disappearance of almost 7 million people—and whaddya know? Suddenly a show about 2% of the world’s population vanishing, and the resulting emotional toll on the people left behind, becomes a prescient masterpiece I couldn’t get enough of and couldn’t/can’t stop recommending to everyone. Did you ask me? I don’t care.
Part of me wishes I had followed all the way through with the original watch, because I would love to understand how my thoughts about the whole series changed after the pandemic, but I’ll take my initial meh-interest vs. eventual unqualified adoration to mean they would have changed, mmm, a lot.
Sure, the original, high-concept premise is intriguing, but I find those stories—the big “what if?” ones—are often pretty hard to tell well, either because a) the world-building is tiring for people who aren’t used to it (I don’t usually read/watch fantasy or science-fiction, and even if it’s “cool” my patience is pretty low both for drawn-out “here’s how everything is here” tours AND the “what the fuck is happening” vagueness of a slow-reveal); or, b) the world is well built, but the real story and characters within it are thin or boring or trite because the fun part for the author was creating the world, and it shows.
The Leftovers isn’t set in a foreign land per se—it’s, in the book and in Season One, a fictionalized Westchester, NY—but it is a mindfuck-y leap to get to “a shit ton of people are just gone now—thoughts?” It’s a question that could very easily be too big to not suffocate the kind of little, personal story we usually need to effectively relate.
Or, it was before the pandemic.
And I think that’s so interesting. That a work of art lived *over here* at the time of its creation, in a place where people could choose to go and abstractly consider how they would feel/what they would do there… but then the world changed so much that now every single human on Earth has an obvious anchor onto which this story can (and probably can’t help but) be tied. It’s just not all that abstract now to think about a meaningful chunk of the population disappearing. To think about what that means for our survival, for our relationships, for our life purpose. We did that. We’re still doing it. And The Leftovers is such a cool lens through which to contemplate it further. Especially now, with a little distance from the terror of it. Just watch it. It’s great.
Okay, now to go a little deeper into the narrative strategy. This is the part that’s kind of spoiler-y.
I think Tom Perrotta, the author of the book the first season was adapted from, handled the big question and smaller story beautifully, mostly because of a clever choice to pay hardly any attention to why everyone disappeared and where they went. If you were to pitch me “a bunch of people disappeared suddenly, and…”, I would get stuck on the, “wait, why? Where’d they go?” You might keep talking and say, “well, it doesn’t really matter, because the point of the story is how the people who are left cope with the losses and how they make sense of their lives and connections knowing now that…”, but I’d still be like, “okay, but are you sure that’s the interesting part?” And you, if you were Tom, would say, “it is.” And you’d be right.
There is, of course, a subtle, background-level hum of “why?,” but by the time the book is set, 3 years after the “Sudden Departure,” none of the main characters really care. Kevin and Jill just care that their wife/mom has given up. Nora just cares that she’s so much more alone than she would have been if she’d never gotten married or had kids. Even the Guilty Remnant, the group with the strongest opinion about the meaning of the Sudden Departure, just cares that everyone remember that nothing matters anymore. And so without a character through which to fixate on “but what happened to them?,” the reader—and viewer of the first two and a half seasons—just, doesn’t. And I think that’s why the story doesn’t drown in the world. Way to go, Tom.
Butttt that’s also why, when the series finale just hauls off and answers the “where did they go?” question, it is SO. COOL. Ahhh. What a fun experience as a viewer, to get an answer to a big, looming question that you weren’t even asking (anymore, if ever).
The tone of the book, which is only the source material for Season One (Season Two and Three are original to Tom and co-creator Damon Lindelof and an HBO writers room), is pretty different, much lighter, than the series, and I think the series takes the lack of focus on the why/what happened even further. Many of the main characters either claim to not want to know/not care where everyone went or actively think it’s foolish to speculate. This has the (deliberate, I think) effect of discouraging the viewer from speculating, too—you don’t want to be foolish, like the most-relatable characters would think you were in their world. You want to focus on what the characters are focused on: how do we move on? Where do we find hope?
So for three seasons, the writers were able to protect the surprise answer to the (other) big question, because we weren’t even really asking it. And because we weren’t—because we had already gotten so much out of contemplating the deeper, “where do we go from here?” existential questions—the “what happened, though?” answer saves itself from being a let down a la everything M. Night Shyamalan has done since The Sixth Sense.
And the ending, then, is just like, “Oh. Wow. Of course. That’s absolutely perfect. And now I can see how understanding what happened is both everything and nothing.”
And damn if that isn’t the most ridiculously enviable2 reaction from an audience you could ask for.
Binge-watching with a 6-month-old means watching an absurdly reasonable one or two episodes per night between the baby going to sleep and passing out oneself at 8:30 PM.
I was so relieved to learn that a single dude didn’t create the whole story. The book was an enjoyable read, but it’s clear that the collaboration with Damon Lindelof and the other writers took the material to a way more impressive place. I was going to be preeeety discouraged about anything I might be able capable of writing if one author had architected that whole narrative.