Television review: THE LEFTOVERS, season 1

Damon Lindelof loosely doled out questions (and wrongly promised answers) on his breakout show Lost, and his new HBO drama The Leftovers could reasonably be taken as a direct rebuke to that oft-criticized method. The series begins with two percent of the world’s population – randomly-selected, old and young, famous and ordinary – mysteriously disappearing on Oct. 14, 2011, and explores the fallout in the small New York town of Mapleton three years later. But The Leftovers, co-created by Tom Perotta (author of the source eponymous novel), is stripped of mythological reasoning and fantastical elements. It is purely human storytelling, curious about our capacity to have faith, to move on, and to ascertain purpose and meaning in our existence.

It’s also a show aggressively reliant on experience – a successful Leftovers episode is, for the viewer, disorienting, emotionally draining, and unbearably relatable. Its opposition to “answers” extends beyond the “how” and “why”; here, characterization and exposition is irrelevant. Everyone has a different story, and everyone reacts to this unfathomable event in their own way. The Leftovers is a macro-level story about the human condition. Lindelof and Perotta explore grandly humanistic themes by challenging their world with the ultimate test of faith, the definitive dismissal of the idea that there are answers and explanations for the unprovable in this life.

Lindelof’s approach is often existentially ponderous. As such, The Leftovers has inspired a great deal of outright raves and an equal amount of vitriolic reactions. But after completing the ten-hour first season, I was surprised to find myself curiously in the middle. This is a show that can be downright devastating – and it really feels like nothing else on television or in movies – but it’s also maddeningly inconsistent. I’d argue, in fact, that Leftovers doesn’t fully commit to its conceit. When it can sustain its intimacy, its big-hearted emotion and – most importantly – its authenticity for an entire hour, its power is nearly unsurpassable. But this is a show where distracting storylines, or a less-than-compelling performance, or disparate focuses all have magnified effects – for a show so reliant on experience, one blip in the hour can severely weaken its impact.

At its best, The Leftovers is an ideal fusion of the sensibilities of Lindelof and executive producer Peter Berg, who helmed the series’ first two episodes to set its visual and emotional template. Berg’s Friday Night Lights was similarly threaded by an intimate, singular tonal consistency, and could often generate tears with a simple, wordless, almost mournful sequence. That’s absolutely on display here: at times, images and music are stitched together so perfectly that I felt my heart dropping and eyes welling, without any explanation as to why. 

Lindelof brings the character-centric approach of Lost. That show's trademark POV episode structure returns here for a couple of installments: for an entire hour, we spend time with a character on the show’s fringe, and get to know their grief, their pain, their guilt and their capacity to feel better. It’s a device that, in what on reflection may be troubling, provides the series’ irrefutable creative peaks.

Outside of two POV episodes, The Leftovers is framed around a family (seemingly) unaffected by the disappearance. The unit is broken, even still: mother Laurie (Amy Brenneman of Judging Amy) has abandoned her family to join the Guilty Remnant (GR), a cult-like organization in which its members do not speak and whose sole, vague purpose is to “remind” the world of the disappearances; son Tommy (Chris Zylka) has dropped out of college to follow Holy Wayne (Paterson Joseph, a compelling presence), a self-described prophet that heals the pain of those broken by the disappearances; and daughter Jill (Margaret Qualley) has begun acting out, denying her own capacity for happiness and the ability of humankind to really, truly move on. It leaves father Kevin Garvey (Justin Theroux), our central character, in a state of depression and paranoia, left to care for his daughter and, as Police Chief, maintain order in a town where tensions have long been simmering.

Building The Leftovers around the Garvey family is an intelligent if occasionally uninspired choice. Laurie’s admission to the GR gives us our in – we watch a seemingly content bride-to-be (Liv Tyler) suddenly initiate herself into the cult, and observe this increasingly-large bloc of residents’ willingness to be cruel and heartless in the name of “reminding” – while Kevin’s policing of the town nicely surveys the ways in which different corners of the town have reacted, or suppressed, the disappearance. In general, the family centralizes the show by way of honing in on a core concern in The Leftovers – how such an event, however peripheral, can extract unattended-to feelings of purposelessness, faithlessness and hopelessness. An ordinary family of four, contending with parenthood and marriage and aging, is suddenly forced to ask much bigger questions about themselves and their world.

A scene in the fifth episode, in which Laurie is wavering and struggling with guilt for leaving her family, does a wonderful job of extrapolating just how complicated and painfully-realized this person’s newly-minted convictions are. But generally, the family is never interesting enough to justify the amount of time spent with them. Lindelof and his team of writers often overstretch in thematically linking the four family members’ storylines. (Especially heavy-handed is the fourth episode, which uses the disappearance of the baby in the town’s Manger as a motif for the blind faith each Garvey holds in their beliefs.) Moreover, Tommy running away with a young girl impregnated by Wayne fails to convince or compel for a second, while Qualley’s monotonously gloomy performance as Jill weighs too many scenes down. Even Theroux, likeable and solid, and playing a character that is refreshingly soft and vulnerable, lacks the gravitas and persuasiveness to anchor such a deeply-felt and abstractly-realized piece of storytelling.

The ninth episode, a flashback which explains – gasp! – that everything wasn’t totally alright before 10/14/2011, is both contradictory to the show’s purpose and a lowly attempt to shade these underdeveloped characters. A critical implication of The Leftovers is that what happens to the residents of Mapleton post-disappearance is not out of the blue, but rather the bursting of the bubble of repression. To so literally iterate that idea feels inorganic; it provides answers we don't need, and unfortunately removes the haunting mystery that was the past. It's completely counterintuitive to this show’s essence, of being able to experience and feel the characters without needing to point and say, “This is why she is acting like this.” Because, frankly, The Leftovers isn’t quite sharp enough to warrant that type of viewing experience.

But man, for the many stumbles of Lindelof and his team of writers, The Leftovers is frequently extraordinary. The third episode, “Three Boats and a Helicopter,” is a riveting morality tale exclusively focused on preacher Matt Jamison (played with great verve and intensity by the excellent Christopher Eccleston). In one of the best hours of television I’ve seen this year, it posits the contradictory ideas of faith and religion by asking how far this man will go to believe what he’s always believed, even in the face of such an unholy, inexplicable event. On a broader scale, it speaks to the importance of belief and faithful commitment in finding that illusive “purpose” so vigorously sought after by everyone in The Leftovers.

The other POV episode, “Guest,” is equally magnificent: we follow Nora Durst (Carrie Coon), who lost her husband and two children on Oct. 14. We watch how she grieves, how she punishes herself and refuses to let go of her guilt; how deep inside she is desperately trying to break out and move on. Coon is extraordinary in this role, playing despair and grief so powerfully that it can be difficult to watch. And when Nora later romances Kevin, it not-so-coincidentally renders our protagonist finally involving and interesting – to watch these two lost souls come together gives The Leftovers a necessary dosage of hope and comfort. 

Ann Dowd, meanwhile, gives a masterful, charismatic performance as Patti, leader of the GR and friend to Laurie. This show deserves a lot of credit for mining so much terrific material out of the GR, mainly because their scenes are predominantly dialogue-free. Yet Dowd and Brenneman (also great for that matter) convey so much with a glance, a gesture, a quiver. They are mesmerizing.

The challenge of The Leftovers is that it has to be mesmerizing. When it can maintain its tone, like in “Two Boats and a Helicopter” or “Guest” or maybe “Cairo” – which is almost wholly an exceptional two-hander between representatives of the two sides of the show, Theroux and Dowd – this is flawless television. But this show is exceptionally experiential, and is not strong enough to be so reliant on utter immersion. Outside of its POV episodes, The Leftovers rarely reaches greatness. For a show with a great concept, and exploring such big ideas in an ambitious and admirable manner, it’s frustrating that Lindelof makes obvious and correctable mistakes. But he does so consistently, right up to a finale that is distractingly unfocused until a horrifyingly sensational ending sequence. That effectively sums up the quality of The Leftovers’ first season: disparate and unfocused, but consistently, sporadically amazing.

Grade: B

Available for streaming on HBOGO.

Andrew’s conversation piece on The Leftovers can be accessed here.