"The Leftovers": Left Behind

A close look at a show “like Marvel’s Thanos snap, but with actual consequences”.

The Leftovers (2014 - 2017)

Anyone who reads a lot of books or watches a lot of movies will recognise the phenomenon of “unintended patterns” in what one reads or watches: an unexpected run of reading books about, say, women artists who died young, or watching every film Owen Wilson was in (and perhaps only realising this after the third Wes Anderson film). Over the last few months, I’ve been inadvertently catching up on TV shows from the golden era of roughly 2005 - 2015. I’ve been rewatching Lost with my best friend, wondering with my wife if Brody is a terrorist in Homeland, and I’ve now finally watched The Leftovers. It’s been a fantastic few months.

The premise of The Leftovers is powerfully revealed in its first few minutes: the world is living in the wake of two percent of the global population mysteriously vanishing. It’s a wonderfully clever idea (that comes from the book the show is based on, whose author, Tom Perrotta, co-created the series) that only a fraction of the world …