The Leftovers: it's the TV event of the year (to me and me alone?) | Television & radio
Allow me to draw you a venn diagram. One side is labelled “People Who Care About The Leftoversâ€. The other is “People Who Prefer Not to Illegally Download Television Programmesâ€. You see the middle? You see that tiny, minuscule overlap? Look closely. Really lean in and squint. On that overlap is a picture of my face.
The overwhelming majority of you don’t give a stuff about The Leftovers. It’s a delightful, beguiling, thematically rich programme that’s perfectly written and exquisitely acted, and yet the second series was so overwhelmingly underwatched that Damon Lindelof literally had to go on a press tour to convince HBO to let him finish the story properly. In the annual Guardian Best Shows list of 2015, I named the second series of The Leftovers the year’s greatest programme, and it still didn’t even crack the top 20. This leads me to believe that no one at the Guardian watched the bloody thing.
And the rest of you? The scrap of fervent Leftovers fans who gave this show a shot and ended up adoring it as much as me? It’s already ancient history to you. Although the third and final series begins on Sky Atlantic this week, the finale aired on HBO a month ago. I’ve been waiting almost three months for the first episode. In an age of simulcasts and next-day streaming, this delay is a scandal. No wonder everyone went off and watched it online instead. Sky Atlantic have bodged the handling of this beyond recognition. Its treatment of The Leftovers is unforgivable. It might genuinely be the channel’s biggest ever mistake. (And, given that it once commissioned and aired an Ann Widdecombe-fronted gameshow called Cleverdicks, that’s really saying something.)
Look, I get that The Leftovers is a tough sell. It is a series that explicitly deals with grief, set in a world where two percent of the population has mysteriously vanished. The loss each character feels is agonising and institutional. Everyone knows someone who went missing. Some lost their entire families. People react by joining overtly evil religions where members chainsmoke and adhere to a menacing vow of silence. Others wear bulletproof vests and hire prostitutes to shoot them in the chest. In the very first episode, which ladled on the depression so gratuitously it’s a wonder anyone even finished it, a girl reacted to the departure by lying on a dirty mattress and weeping while a teenage boy masturbated next to her. The whole thing was ornately miserable. It was an intricate tableau of despair. It was television as death by quicksand.
Add to this the fact that viewers were still burned by Lindelof’s handling of the Lost finale, and sceptical of his insistence that the central question would never be answered, and you don’t exactly have a recipe for a feelgood blockbuster.
But the second series represents perhaps the greatest season-to-season improvement in all of TV history. It suddenly figured out how to wear its grief lightly. It took on a new, winkingly self-referential theme tune in Iris DeMent’s Let The Mystery Be. It had more momentum than the gloomy tone poem of before. Characters had a little more light to counterbalance all their terrible shade. It turned into a gorgeous love story of sorts, albeit a love story between two desperately broken people; one of whom had the inexplicable ability to transform into an interdimensional assassin.
The third series, from the sliver of stateside reviews I’ve allowed myself to skim, is supposed to be another leap forward. Its sadness is offset by moments of giddy weirdness and â€" at times â€" outright comedy. Better yet, all reports suggest that it sticks the landing. Its finale is apparently little short of a masterpiece, achieving more than enough to exorcise Lindelof’s lingering sense of failure â€" justified or otherwise â€" over Lost’s last episode. To say I’m excited is a gigantic understatement. For me, this is the television event of the year.
But what does it matter? If you didn’t like the sound of The Leftovers, this won’t convince you otherwise. If you’re a fan, you’ve already seen it. But if by some incredible miracle you find yourself in the same boat as me, please let me know. It’s lonely out here. Maybe we can let the mystery be together.
The Leftovers starts tonight (finally) at 10pm on Sky Atlantic.
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