“It’s easier to stay silent than it is to speak the truth.”
Thank goodness for Carrie Coon and Justin Theroux, and to a lesser extent, Scott Glenn, Amy Brenneman, Christopher Eccleston, Liv Tyler, Margaret Qualley, Ann Dowd, &c—there’s really not a bad apple in the bunch, truth be told. If not for their consummate acting abilities, The Leftovers would surely collapse under the weight of its Mystery Box. Now, I love me some pulpy supernatural sci-fi, some religious connotations, some existential agitation, some armchair philosophizing, some avant garde surrealism. I even love me some soap opera shenanigans, some jarring tonal shifts, some unexpected needle drops, some unashamed camp. I mean, that’s basically Twin Peaks (1990–1991) in a nutshell, right? What I don’t love, however, is being preached at by a show that is utterly convinced of its own profundity and yet unable to make it through a single episode without retreating to an ironic handling of its boldest ideas. That’s The Leftovers in a nutshell.
The concepts here are scattershot, but not without intrigue. In the series’ first episode, 2% of the world’s population disappears all at once. That’s quite the hook, and one that showrunner Damon Lindelof (creator of Lost [2004–2010]) immediately begins building around. Nonsensical cults spring up; a holy man (Paterson Joseph) comes to believe his hugs can heal people and he begins impregnating every female Asian-American that comes into his orbit; a redneck (Michael Gaston) starts shooting wild packs of dogs roving around Mapleton, NY. It’s a smorgasbord of wild ingredients, haphazardly tossed into the little town that Chief Kevin Garvey (Theroux) has sworn to protect.
The show’s outspoken proponents would suggest that any naysaying is, at root, due to Lindelof’s restraint in dishing out answers to the questions raised by the plot. How did the 2% disappear? Why are there feral dogs running amok? Why are people dressing in all white, refusing to speak, divorcing their spouses, smoking cigarettes, stalking random townsfolk, and staging elaborate “reminders”? Are the voices Kevin Sr. (Glenn) hears real? Why does Kevin Jr. sleepwalk? Why does a manhole cover explode into the sky? Why is a deer invading peoples’ homes? I don’t need any of those questions answered, per se. Like those apologists, I’m here for thematic rumination. I don’t care by what mechanism these people disappeared; rather show me the psychospiritual fallout of the survivors. Let’s explore how people cope with this big, mysterious albatross that looms over their pasts and futures.
Where I differ from the advocates is that I don’t think the show consistently delivers what it promises in this regard. It’s only in the second season, when Kevin and Nora (Coon), newly in love, transplant themselves to an inexplicably spared town in Texas, that the show achieves an acceptable balance between atonal absurdism, existential sadness, and adequate storytelling. The first season is burdened with the nihilistic Guilty Remnant cult—which is formed around such a flimsy conceit that it is almost laughable when several characters join it (but I guess that’s how cults work)—and the third season is marred by an incredibly unique sense that it is totally convinced of its own spiritual gravity and yet also certain that the material is deeply silly.
The third season is where several prominent characters become convinced that Kevin is immortal, maybe-apostate clergyman Matt (Eccleston) writes a sequel to the New Testament with Kevin as the new messiah, and Kevin becomes a dream assassin sent to purgatory to kill his doppelgänger, who is also the President of the United States. Er, what? To make matters worse, these jags are usually presented as powerful and cathartic—except, just when you think a deep emotional moment has emerged from the muddle and the show has finally achieved its goal of symbolically conveying something of what it’s like to cope with an unbearable trauma, it typically proceeds to treat that moment like the build up to a punchline by punctuating it with an ironic song choice or a sarcastic remark that doesn’t fit the mood at all.
Each time this happened I couldn’t help but think that Lindelof was experiencing a moment of gravitational cognizance. Upon realizing that he had strayed well past the edge of the cliff, no longer attempting to say anything meaningful but merely stretching the plot absurdities as far as they could go and still be held in check by sheer production value, he would flail around and try to suggest that he was never taking it all that seriously in the first place. This renders suspect even the truly great non sequitur moments, like when Nora and Erika (Regina King) blast Wu Tang Clan and jump on the trampoline, or the ghost of Patti (Dowd) explains to Kevin how she was offended when she discovered that her husband was engaging a prostitute to poop on his chest—why, in all those years of marriage, had he never asked her to poop on his chest?
Anyway, all of this manages to hold together well enough to actually finish the show—which ends on a pretty good note, all things considered—but it only does so because the cast is downright phenomenal. I mean, I thought the subplot that saw Kevin Sr. dressing up in aboriginal garb and trying to ward off the proverbial oncoming flood with rain dances was nonsensical, but man does Scott Glenn sell it. And Coon and Theroux are brilliant in their vulnerability in even the most unconventional of scenarios, like when Theroux must sing ‘Homeward Bound’ at an afterlife karaoke bar in order to return to the land of the living or have his manhood scanned to verify his identity. It’s because of the stellar cast that some of these moments of randomly concocted absurdity and faux-depth actually rise to the level of poignance—well, the cast, Max Richter’s theme music, and the raw chutzpah of the presentation.
The real shame is that there are passages of genuine beauty and joy and weirdness and sadness here, and Lindelof is trying to blaze a generally interesting trail, but all of it feels so calculated, unnatural, and unfelt by its writer(s), that it only works in fits and starts when the cast and crew can transcend the pseudo-mystical outline of the material and actually grasp at something profound, however intermittently.
All that said, The Leftovers is ultimately unwieldy enough that a future rewatch may offer vastly different rewards. I didn’t love it, but I do love that HBO was willing to spend millions of dollars to bring such an off-the-wall vision to life, and I appreciate the ideas and the confidence with which it was made. It wasn’t exactly hateful, being strung along all that time. I wouldn’t be opposed to dipping my toes into those murky waters again.