Set in a New York suburb several years after two percent of the world’s population instantaneously, and incomprehensibly, disappeared, HBO's The Leftovers meditates on faith and purpose. It mines the beauty out of the miserable, asking how we react to the unimaginable -- how the presentation of an inexplicable event of seismic proportions shakes individuals, families and societies.
The series pilot was directed by Peter Berg, and he (as well as Max Richter’s stunning piano theme) imbued The Leftovers with an emotional aesthetic to fit its premise: the cue of the music, combined with the twitchiness of the camera, could turn a moment hauntingly sad, with a string of images communicating grief and pain as experienced at its core. In its first season, however, The Leftovers could also turn heavy-handed with its metaphors; creator Damon Lindelof so engaged with grief on an intellectual level that he occasionally overpowered his characters and story. The series was also, more problematically, rarely conventionally good. Outside of its point-of-view episodes -- which were focused on a single, or small group of, characters -- the show had significant pacing issues.
The trick to effective change in television is preservation -- not of structure or characters or even theme, but of identity. Great art is, by nature, distinct -- how it makes you feel or think or invest should at least marginally differ from what else is out there. The Leftovers has held this quality from the outset, and its bumpy debut season created a mandate for growth. But if it were to so radically change that it lost what made it unique in the first place -- like, say, Friday Night Lights’ second-season shift into soapy teen melodrama -- then it'd be more of a re-invention than an evolution. Television makes room for fixes and edits, but it also provides a unique type of challenge: it requires narrative growth as well as a consistent purpose.
Fortunately, Lindelof has risen to said challenge: he's snipped, cut and edited the second season of The Leftovers to perfect effect. The season premiere is audacious, near-entirely taking place in a brand new location with never-before-seen characters. The new town is Jarden “Miracle” Texas, a suburb drenched in mythology as the one place in the world to get through Departure Day without losing a single resident. We meet the Murphys, a family of four with an ideal surface but bubbling darkness beneath it, and come to know their anti-ghost town. The episode progresses with a measured pace: very little “happens,” but director Mimi Leder injects every moment with a sizzling albeit implacable degree of tension. That sense of unease builds with every scene. Eventually, Mapleton priest Matt Jamison (Christopher Eccleston) shows up, ready to lead the church of this divine town. Later, season 1 characters Kevin Garvey (Justin Theroux), his girlfriend Nora (Carrie Coon) and his daughter Jill (Margaret Qualley) move in next door to the Murphys, kicking off new lives in a place promising safety and rebirth. And finally, there’s an earthquake, and then, a disappearance. Is it a departure? A red herring? Something else?
Three episodes in, Lindelof hasn’t told us a thing. Instead, the next two episodes -- the first told from Kevin, Nora and Jill’s perspective; the second from Kevin’s ex-wife Laurie (Amy Brenneman) and estranged son Tommy’s (Chris Zylka) -- have taken place in an identical timeframe. These episodes are intensely contained, masterfully written, searingly acted and beautifully directed. The show is exploring geography on a weepy, esoteric plane; rather than promise answers, Lindelof and his writers are seeking as much as their characters. They're contending with what cannot be explained, wrestling with tragedy from startling new angles.
Three episodes in, Lindelof hasn’t told us a thing. Instead, the next two episodes -- the first told from Kevin, Nora and Jill’s perspective; the second from Kevin’s ex-wife Laurie (Amy Brenneman) and estranged son Tommy’s (Chris Zylka) -- have taken place in an identical timeframe. These episodes are intensely contained, masterfully written, searingly acted and beautifully directed. The show is exploring geography on a weepy, esoteric plane; rather than promise answers, Lindelof and his writers are seeking as much as their characters. They're contending with what cannot be explained, wrestling with tragedy from startling new angles.
If the first episode of the new season methodically tears down an illusion of perfection, the second goes in the opposite direction: it follows a trio of damaged people aimlessly straining to escape what cannot be escaped. The third episode, as dark as The Leftovers has ever gone, confronts grief with visceral albeit nuanced emotion. Cumulatively, these episodes fit together like a mosaic. But individually, they’re powerful character studies, each angle adding new insight and complexity to Lindelof’s vision. The show is now exclusively point-of-view episodes, each installment unprecedented in its connectivity. The show is steadily building to a dramatization of grief that's melancholy, but not maudlin; serious, but without pretension; and painful, hitting its targets with revelatory force.
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Like The Leftovers, Showtime's The Affair is an exercise in atmospheric humanism, exploring human behavior from a macro point-of-view by intimately depicting a small group of characters. The titular event is the series’ starting point, and also -- deliberately -- its least interesting component. In the first season, each episode was segmented into two points-of-view: Noah’s (Dominic West), a novelist who’s married and a father to four, and Alison’s (Ruth Wilson), a working class Montauk waitress grieving with her husband, Cole (Joshua Jackson), over the loss of their three-year-old son. The two began an affair while Noah and his wife, Helen (Maura Tierney), were on summer vacation in Montauk. Each episode would provide separate plots as well as considerable overlap of events, exposing how differently Noah and Alison remembered their encounters. And as if that framing device weren’t enough, most installments were bookended by flash-forwards, in which Alison and Noah were revealed as married but entangled in a mysterious homicide case.
Creator Sarah Treem got a lot right in this ambitious, occasionally overwrought first season. Her dialogue crackled with specificity and depth, expertly swerving between the two characters’ perspectives. Moreover, as with Lindelof, her writing felt pure in its messiness, exploring conceptions of fidelity, romance and worldview with more curiosity than pointedness. But she did run astray. The detective arc never quite clicked; there was the occasional “suspect,” like the creepy Montauk restaurateur Oscar, that felt misplaced in this fundamentally domestic chronicle. Later, in the season finale, a drastic differentiation of memory turned this normally sharp and muted drama into a wild, erratic romantic thriller. It ended with Noah, in the future, escorted away in handcuffs -- an unusual way to end a season of such authentic emotional resonance.
Fortunately, the second season has taken a massive leap. For one thing, the flash-forwards are more engaging, now that ex-spouses Helen and Cole are involved. Likely as a response to the overstuffed final episodes of the first season, Treem opens season 2 by slowing things down. It’s amazing just how much of the first three episodes are dialogue-free -- perspectives expand to Helen and Cole, which makes for a fascinating foray into loneliness and heartbreak -- especially since they feel fuller and more dramatically revved than anything last year.
Jeffrey Reiner’s direction of the show remains piercingly intimate, his camera honing in on motifs like a saltwater pool or an old chest to bury silent ghosts into images and scenes. Treem and her staff, meanwhile, have thus far constructed three moving hours of television drama. Characters continue to be drawn with pessimistic realism, but their portrayers’ empathy -- and their writers’ intelligence -- keeps the show from turning too dour. Instead, The Affair is a sobering account of love, fulfillment and self. It’s a free-flowing narrative portrait of impulse -- and of how much our relationship to others is dependent on how we see ourselves.
Never less than provocative, these two series remain polarizing, occasionally miserable and tonally suffocating. But that was always the intention. Now, it’s just harder to point to those attributes as flaws.
Creator Sarah Treem got a lot right in this ambitious, occasionally overwrought first season. Her dialogue crackled with specificity and depth, expertly swerving between the two characters’ perspectives. Moreover, as with Lindelof, her writing felt pure in its messiness, exploring conceptions of fidelity, romance and worldview with more curiosity than pointedness. But she did run astray. The detective arc never quite clicked; there was the occasional “suspect,” like the creepy Montauk restaurateur Oscar, that felt misplaced in this fundamentally domestic chronicle. Later, in the season finale, a drastic differentiation of memory turned this normally sharp and muted drama into a wild, erratic romantic thriller. It ended with Noah, in the future, escorted away in handcuffs -- an unusual way to end a season of such authentic emotional resonance.
Fortunately, the second season has taken a massive leap. For one thing, the flash-forwards are more engaging, now that ex-spouses Helen and Cole are involved. Likely as a response to the overstuffed final episodes of the first season, Treem opens season 2 by slowing things down. It’s amazing just how much of the first three episodes are dialogue-free -- perspectives expand to Helen and Cole, which makes for a fascinating foray into loneliness and heartbreak -- especially since they feel fuller and more dramatically revved than anything last year.
Jeffrey Reiner’s direction of the show remains piercingly intimate, his camera honing in on motifs like a saltwater pool or an old chest to bury silent ghosts into images and scenes. Treem and her staff, meanwhile, have thus far constructed three moving hours of television drama. Characters continue to be drawn with pessimistic realism, but their portrayers’ empathy -- and their writers’ intelligence -- keeps the show from turning too dour. Instead, The Affair is a sobering account of love, fulfillment and self. It’s a free-flowing narrative portrait of impulse -- and of how much our relationship to others is dependent on how we see ourselves.
Never less than provocative, these two series remain polarizing, occasionally miserable and tonally suffocating. But that was always the intention. Now, it’s just harder to point to those attributes as flaws.