The Leftovers: Season 2

On Departure Day - 14 October - 120 million people vanished with a trace, disappearing from all over the Earth. The people left behind are shellshocked, confused and mystified as to how it happened. But in one place it didn't happen at all. The town of Jarden, Texas did not lose a single person, which is statistically impossible for a town of its size. Now nicknamed Miracle, the town has become a mecca for the dispossessed, the grieving and the traumatised...including the Garvey family.

Season 2 of The Leftovers picks up a few months after the events of the first and throws a hard, hard curveball at the viewer. A large chunk of the regular cast have relocated over 1,500 miles from Mapleton, New York to Jarden, Texas. On first viewing this feels massively contrived, with the Garvey family, Nora, Matt and his still-comatose wife all finding reasons to make the move and less-interesting characters from Mapleton unceremoniously dropped. Once in Jarden the show also focuses on the Murphy family, who are undergoing their own woes and difficulties.

This shift in location is quite a lot to get used to, and at first it feels less like a continuation of the first season than the start of a spin-off series. However, we eventually touch base with Meg and the Guilty Remnant, what Tom and Jill are up to and a few more dangling storylines left unresolved from the first season, but it takes a while. One upshot of this is that rather than getting a few disconnected scenes with other characters in other places a few times per episode, we instead get a large, focused amount of time for these other characters instead, which makes the individual episodes stand out a bit more.

Instead the season introduces a new mystery: three young women, including one of the Murphys, disappears in the middle of an earthquake. The Garveys, who befriend the Murphys on their first day in town, help out in the search but subsequent events re-open old wounds in the family, particularly Kevin's tendency to go sleepwalking and "lose time." Other storylines involve the Murphys' own marital problems and how Matt is coping with the routine of looking after his wife.

In broad terms, the second season is certainly very strong, but it does suffer from several minor problems compared to the first. The complete change in setting means we spend several episodes spinning wheels a bit as the show has to introduce a new batch of supporting castmembers. Showrunner-writer Damon Lindelof also borrows a couple of tropes from his Lost playbook, most notably playing around with time and dedicating the second episode to showing the flipside of events in the first and then doing something completely different in the third episode. This means that we're four episodes into the season, almost halfway through, before the story starts moving forwards again.

Once the story does kick into a higher gear, it quickly becomes irresistible. The fifth episode, No Room at the Inn, is possibly the finest episode of the series so far, with an absolutely outstanding performance by Christopher Eccleston as Matt starts to lose his cool with his routine of looking after his wife and hoping for her recovery. Subsequent episodes (particularly the bizarre International Assassin) then take a step into the weird, spiritual and surreal, but the phenomenal performances anchor the story even as it takes a step further into the odd. The final two episodes then, rather smartly, bring together all the storylines from Season 2 and a few unresolved elements from Season 1 into a surprisingly effective and well-conceived grand finale.

The second season of The Leftovers (****½) starts slow and takes a while to circle around and get to its point, but when it does it suddenly becomes richly compelling television. It is available via HBO in the United States, but in the UK and other territories you're probably going to have look for an imported Blu-Ray set (the Scandinavian one is compatible with UK players) to get the show in HD.

The Leftovers: Season 1

On October 14th, 2% of the world's population - 140 million people - abruptly disappear. There is no explanation, and the people left behind are shell-shocked. Some people lost friends or distant relatives, but others lost their entire families. Three years later, the town of Mapleton, New York stands as a microcosm for the world. Those who stayed behind - the "leftovers" - are trying to move on with their lives but are anchored by grief and incomprehension to their pasts. For one ideological cult, the Guilty Remnant, that isn't enough and they want people to remember more. For another, which follows an apparent prophet named Holy Wayne, they believe the Departure was the harbinger of something more to follow.

The Leftovers was a relatively low-key HBO series which aired for three seasons between 2014 and 2017. Based on Tom Perrotta's novel and produced and largely written by Damon Lindelof (Lost, Prometheus) in full-on career-resurrection mode, the series depicts an Earth-shattering, inexplicable event and then proceeds to completely ignore the event itself, instead focusing on the grief and confusion that follows, and how people cope with recovering.

It's a solid and interesting idea, as explaining the Departure seems as inherently problematic as explaining the Island on Lost. Any explanation you could come up with - SF, fantasy, religious, secular, extraterrestrial or mundane - would be ridiculous to a large number of viewers, so they simply don't go there. Some may find this frustrating, but the show is at least up-front about it by opening three full years after the event, by which point people have almost given up looking for a rational answer. That said, the fact that no-one seems concerned that it might happen again at any moment is a bit on the odd side of things.

Instead, The Leftovers is about the people left behind and the lives they are trying to salvage. The first season is a slow burn, packed with apparently unrelated and non sequitur storylines and plot points that feel scattered and disconnected, and the show can feel a little laboured until this tangled web of storylines finally straightens out and then comes together with understated elegance in the season finale. The writing and direction tends towards the weird, with occasional musical montages and surreal dream imagery being used to further the story or muse on the themes of the show. The Leftovers also operates with restraint. It never goes as full-on weird as say Twin Peaks and it withholds itself from the schmaltz that Lost could descend into at its weakest, but it toes a fine line between realism and artistic bizarreness that remains compelling.

The show is beautifully shot - as a HBO production, it looks and feels like a lot of money has been spent on it - and finely written. The cast is extraordinary in quality: Justin Theroux (Mulholland Drive), Liv Tyler (Lord of the Rings), Carrie Coon (Fargo), Scott Glenn (The Right Stuff), Amy Brenneman (NYPD Blue), Christopher Eccleston (Doctor Who), Paterson Joseph (Neverwhere) and Ann Dowd (The Handmaid's Tale), along with a host of promising newcomers. All give exceptional performances, with Tyler, Dowd and Brenneman having a lot of work to do as members of the Guilty Remnant, who refuse to communicate verbally. Visually the show is sumptuous in detail and imagery, and well-worth watching in HD (which is problematic if you're in one of those regions where the show has absurdly only been released on DVD, not Blu-Ray). Max Richter's score is phenomenal. There aren't enough superlatives for the amount of work and effort put into the show.

The show also rewards a careful thematic reading, and even rewatching Season 1 once you've seen the flashback episode (the non-ironically-named The Garveys at Their Best) that serves as its penultimate chapter, exploring the characters in the 24 hours leading up to the Departure. Working out the Guilty Remnant's goal and their ideological motivation is interesting, and seeing each episode focus on a character or group of characters and explore them in depth, often with flashbacks, is a great idea (if one Lindelof is recycling from Lost). The series also makes efforts to avoid becoming too one-note, and injects humour and humanity to lighten the gloom and the darkness that could pervade the series if left unchecked. I intercut watching the first season of The Leftovers and the second season of The Handmaid's Tale and it definitely made the latter feel very clunky and incompetent in how to balance a dark premise without descending into voyeuristic misery.

The first season of The Leftovers (****½) is a fantastically-well made and offbeat drama which explores grief, loss and faith through compelling characters, with a cast to die for. It opens a little slow and some may be less keen on the occasional cutaways to apparently unconnected story points, but by the end of the season it has done a fine job of bringing everything together and making sense, setting the scene for the radical change of location and cast in Season 2. It is available via HBO in the United States, but in the UK and other territories you're probably going to have look for an imported Blu-Ray set (the Scandinavian one is compatible with UK players) to get the show in HD.