Our Highest Rec: The Revelation and Rebirth of The Leftovers

Our Highest Rec is when the staff proposes something they find underappreciated, undervalued, or underrated. It's an excuse for us to push our opinions on you.

Talking about television now is an art in the sales pitch. There’s so much to watch now that when you like something, the conversations you have about it are more likely to be geared toward why someone else should watch it as opposed to how you both feel about it, and that’s frustrating. The whole appeal behind entertainment is the possibility of shared experience, and when that experience is absent, our love for that cultural object feels constrained and limited.

That dynamic has been especially true with The Leftovers, the 28-episode HBO drama that aired its series finale last Sunday night. In terms of relevancy, the Leftovers narrative is one of inverse popularity: As critics grew to love the show over time, viewership dropped and dropped. It truly is a cult program, one destined for best-of-decade lists as much as it is the bottom of people’s streaming queues, in the “eh, eventually” slot.

On the surface, that narrative makes sense given the show’s subject matter. The premise of The Leftovers is an inherent barrier to sampling it: In a single moment, 2-percent of the world’s population disappears, and those left behind are given zero answers to go with infinite consequences. The number of the lost sounds small, and perhaps it is, but it’s enough to be a disruption without being apocalyptic. There’s a precision at work, one that the show would ironically covet in its early days before abandoning entirely. 

You can imagine that such a weighty premise would give way to some metric-ton themes, and it does. The Leftovers submerges itself head-to-toe in conversations about loss, grief, spirituality, and cosmic meaning, and it’s not delicate or accidental in that sense. Showrunner Damon Lindelof (he did Lost, too) has talked about how the series often explored things he was experiencing in his own life, and thus the show’s early days carry an angry, confused, fist-shaking sense of just trying to make it through. It’s horrible and it’s wrenching, but it’s captivating, and if you take time to dig into the scab a little, there are surprising personal rewards to be gleaned from the pain. All the same, that first season is heavy.

But then comes seasons two and three (the final 18 episodes), and their departure from the series’ debut run should enter cultural history as one of the most triumphant shifts in the modern era of television. Sure, there was an uptick in quality—a sopping 8/10 show became a stirring object of perfection—but there also came a vast tonal shift that allowed the creators, and the viewers in turn, to interact with The Leftovers in ways that before seemed unimaginable. The series shifted locations and added new characters. Jokes appeared. Max Richter’s score—cataclysmic and oppressive—began leaving room for songs that actually felt fun, toe-tapping even. Lindelof explained that as he was writing season two, life circumstances lead him to a series of funerals, and his biggest revelation in that time was that even amid tragedy, you could still find people laughing, coming together, finding reasons to be happy. Cue the changes in his show. It was a joy (maybe even a relief?) to watch that realization manifest onscreen.

The Leftovers’ shift prompted some of its more baffling, but also more transcendent, moments. There was the caveman scene. The trampoline scene. The hotel scene (all of them, in fact). The karaoke scene. The lion scene. The scuba diving scene. The scene set in 1844. It was a stacked deck of blockbuster moments, but what made it special was how our responses to it all could still be so shuffled and variant. What makes my jaw drop might make you well up, and vice versa. The Leftovers allowed room for a spectrum of emotions at any given point, and it never judged its viewers for reacting one way or another. It was a show you just had to let happen to you, but the sick irony of it all was as much as you wanted to share your feelings about it, you almost never could. No one was watching The Leftovers with you, so more often than not, you had to deal with all the tough stuff by yourself.

Martin Scorsese wrote that movies and television offer a unique dynamic between work and audience called the “phantom image.” The idea describes how as a show cuts between images, we fill the gaps in between with our own thoughts, feelings, and reactions—phantom images. The interplay between our phantom images and the movie’s actual images is what leads us to love a movie, hate a movie, cry at a movie, laugh at a movie, and on and on. It’s the space where our experience meets the mission of the work’s creator. The Leftovers presses into that idea more than any show in recent memory. It demands you to engage with it, and that challenge makes it one of the great achievements of modern entertainment.

It wasn’t always easy. The Leftovers leads you to places you aren’t sure you want to follow, but the daring involved in the show turning back and motioning us onward is rather unprecedented already. You might find something funny and not understand why. You might find something sad and not understand why, but because the show is so courageous in its characters and themes and beat-by-beat storytelling, it inspires you to be courageous too. Most shows are lucky to even orbit a realm of authentic feeling. The Leftovers plummets straight toward your heart.

And that’s what sticks most about the show, because as it turns out, you don’t really need a dialogue with someone else to love it to the fullest. You don’t need an external vessel to pour all your thoughts and feelings and crazy conspiracy theories into; the show is the vessel. That’s beautiful. As you wrestle with something, you can see the characters and creators struggling along with you. As you search for joy or humor in something, you can see the characters and creators strike a vein of dark comedy. As you question, and doubt, and worry, and hope, you see that all happening onscreen and in the background. From its conception to its creation to its presentation, The Leftovers embodied the difficulty of its own themes. It was self-responsive and self-reflective. It opened the door for you to be the same.

I’ll miss this show, but I don’t wish for more of it. What’s here is gorgeous, even in its flaws. So often we describe great things in culture as “an experience,” but there are few better platitudes to stamp upon The Leftovers. We reach out and engage with almost everything we see on television, but only the rarest of shows engage us back. Through every single frame—good, bad, or infuriating—The Leftovers did that, and the result was singularly beautiful. I won’t forget this show, but I’ll revisit it often. What a special thing, amid this lonely world of personalized culture, to find something onscreen with such a strong, obvious heartbeat.