Stumbling Into a New Format - The Leftovers s1

When it comes to a pre-premiere state, few things were more exciting than The Leftovers.

Fortunate enough to have a bunch of friends who were LOSTheads, the prospect of Damon Lindelof’s big return to television (and HBO no less) was appointment television. We had a big viewing party for the first episode’s premiere. While I quite liked it, I was (ironically) an island. Like Interstellar (also 2014), everyone I watched it with really, really didn’t like it. If they made it through the first episode, everyone basically turned it off after episode two.

Part of this is the byproduct of The Leftovers being a very different show from LOST. Being Lindelof’s first project and one on primetime network TV, LOST had a gripping plot, a sprawling cast of characters and a bunch of adventure right from the start. The Leftovers centers its focus on a disrupted nuclear family (mostly) living in a small New York suburb. For its premise, LOST had an exciting central question (“how are these people going to get off the island!”); The Leftovers had a premise based around a bleak but potent thought experiment: “What if 2% of the world’s population went missing and that was the only thing that happened and also it was three years ago but also there’s still no explanation for it and also that’s probably just true forever now?”

The Leftovers is not the pulpy adventure of LOST. It’s not a show that’s always pleasant (especially throughout the first season). The entire premise lends itself to a deep, brutal examination of grief in all its facets. And the first episode ends with the main character pulling out a handgun and opening fire on a whole bunch of wild dogs. Cool guy. To say nothing of the sado-masochistic teenage parties, the imagery of joint-suicide, or the assholes wearing white who chain smoke while stare-stalking the town’s residents.

Revisiting it now, it’s easy to see all these pressure points turning people off. Meanwhile my own weird outlook on life kept me laser focused on the insanity-inducing promise of the premise. The reward for my patience and hope was a singular television experience. That’s not to say the first season is great. It’s good at best. But within it there are shining moments of brilliance that preview the show to come, even as the show in its original conception actively attempts to smother the series’ great promise.

Buying the premise

A lot of the struggling with this show is a result of the series’ premise. And… if it sounds uninteresting to a viewer, it stands to reason that said viewer probably wouldn’t like the show overall. The core inciting incident (2% of the world’s population vanishes with neither warning nor explanation nor pattern) is incredible on its face. It’s inherently genre, and sparks the sort of big question energy Lindelof generally finds himself drawn to. But that premise is the only thing that’s really genre about the show. Sure, there’s a weird sort of thing going on with Kevin (the recurring deer imagery, his sense that he’s borderline losing it), but that feels relatively rational and without any sort of supernatural aspect.

It’s hard for audiences to get on board with the eternal frustration of this show’s premise. For me, I’ve always found it engaging and an incredible vehicle by which Lindelof & co can explore grief and loneliness. Sure, 2% means the chances of anyone personally losing someone to the Sudden Departure are relatively small. Indeed, the Garveys themselves remain physically intact and “all” survive the mass vanishing. And yet, 2% is also big enough that you would almost certainly know someone who lost someone, however distantly affected.

Without any explanation for why the Sudden Departure happened, it’s the sort of occurence that can only beget madness. Any of these characters can go through their day without a major reminder that the world changed one day, suddenly and without warning. But all it takes is that one moment for it all to come crashing back down. These disappearances are tangible. That makes them undeniable. It’s proof of some higher power, something humanity can’t explain and can barely even explore.

The result is a show filled with coping mechanisms. Rage, despair, ignorance… all of these have manifested with these characters by the time the series begins, some three years after the Departure.

The Garveys

If there’s a central issue with The Leftovers’ first season, it’s the way the series attempts to tell the story of the central family at the narrative’s heart. Kevin (Justin Theroux) is a troubled individual, working as a cop in Mapleton and trying desperately to hold together the long-since-tattered fabric of his family. He lives with his daughter Jill (Margaret Qualley) and her best friend Aimee (Emily Meade). His soon-to-be-ex-wife Laurie (Amy Brenneman) has joined a local cult called The Guilty Remnant, meaning she’s one of those white-wearing, chain-smoking, and never-speaks, stand-stalkers. Their son Tom (Chris Zylka) is living on the west coast, having joined a group following an enigmatic, charismatic individual who calls himself Holy Wayne (Patterson Joseph). He remains separated from the family for the entire season (save the special case of episode nine and his final scene in the finale).

All of the Garveys certainly have an arc within the season, though there’s a strange problem at the center of it that the show can’t figure out. Without the trappings of genre to fall back on, it feels like Lindelof and co struggled with the shape of the overall plot. All the characters land more or less okay, but the underlying malaise of going through the day-to-day of this existence is difficult to dramatize. And even when they do dramatize it, a lot of it feels like melodrama.

This interiority is one the actors play extremely well, even under difficult circumstances. Laurie spends the entire season not talking, and a lot of her emotions remain bottled up due to the tenets of the GR. Tom slowly becomes disillusioned with Holy Wayne. Kevin has… well… a lot going on. Though none of these characters are speaking up and fully explaining all the things wrong with hem. Probably because the problems feel stupid and small. Episode 9 makes it clear that all these problems were there before the Sudden Departure. They just needed a spark.

And yet, the best episodes in the first season are “Guest” (episode 106), “Two Boats & a Helicopter” (episode 103), and “The Garveys At Their Best” (episode 109), all three of which sideline the show’s major ongoing storylines. That means 70% of the season is rough stuff.

So… why?

The answer is one that’s only catchable in hindsight. On LOST Lindelof was used to juggling a big ensemble, with characters flitting in and out of the narrative. But every week he would focus on one character as the A-story, give that character a B-story in flashback (or otherwise), and then any extra minutes would be side-stories, check-ins, runners, etc. While the writers broke A/B stories as two separate pieces, they remained connected thematically and tonally. With The Leftovers lacking the flashback structure, Lindelof falls to a more traditional A/B/C/D story structure for the Garvey episodes. This format does not work so well with Lindelof’s capacity for in-depth character excavation. As it stands, the episodes feel slight yet rushed. Whenever Kevin has a story he gets a healthy number of scenes, but there’s no opportunity to track his emotional state because (and this is just how these things traditionally work) when a scene is over they cut to a new character and one of the episode’s other storylines.

It might sound like a release of the building pressure, but structuring episodes this way dilutes the potency of what Lindelof is trying to construct. Whenever a head of steam builds up, the show replaces that kettle with a different one to boil.

All of this makes a majority the first season a difficult watch. The show is opaque enough without all the stories fighting over each other’s scraps for attention.

This is even true in the best Garvey episode, “The Garveys At Their Best”, which flashes back to the 30ish hours before the Sudden Departure. This is the cleanest portrayal of all their various issues, only the show makes it explicit that all of the Garveys themselves are already supremely fucked up. Their relationships are hardly the hunky-dory they seem to be at the outset. The Sudden Departure just took what was already there and supercharged it. Where it succeeds is in the moments where the show hints at higher purpose, like the manhole cover blowing off the ground in a pillar of flame or the seconds-later drive-by of a group of people who confuse Kevin with someone else.

Even then, while that penultimate installment might be the standout for these characters, its very premise makes it non-repeatable. It’s the one time the show can fire that particular gun. And that makes it a strong yet anomalous episode of television.

Put it all on red

No no. The reason The Leftovers works beyond its middling first season is because of two episodes.

“Two Boats and a Helicopter” follows the local pastor Matt Jamison and his attempts to keep his struggling church financially afloat. The episode is one with only an A-story, following Matt through a particularly stressful couple of days. It puts him in every scene and never cuts away. Not only that, this episode came about by virtue of Lindelof & Perrotta casting Christopher Eccleston in a role that was very minor in the original novel. To get him to sign on, they promised to expand his role, which resulted in a full episode’s worth of screentime.

The result is an utterly magnificent episode of television, the first one that starts to play with the sort of narrative stylings that will become the series’ hallmarks moving forward. Because we’re stuck with Matt for so long, it means that all the events that happen in the episode build to a grander and grander catharsis. We can easily track his emotional turmoil and see him for all his virtues and vices, like when he reveals to Nora that her husband was having an affair or the sweet moment when he briefly interacts with Laurie in the Garvey backyard.

The most stunning moment comes when he visits a nearby casino and sees birds on the roulette table he thinks nothing of it. Then, later that night when he’s driving around trying to figure out how to turn a spare $20k into $135k, he finds himself at a stoplight. While there, he notices birds atop the light. Given that he’s stopped, the light itself is red. It connects him right back to that moment from earlier in the episode. So he goes to the casino and plays roulette at that roulette table. After placing all his money on red three times, he manages to octuple what he started with, more than enough to save his church. The adrenaline is such that he beats the shit out of a mugger who tries to rob him, seriously injuring the man who tried to steal his one lifeline.

It’s a tremendous payoff, playing into the show’s themes of the malaise amidst quests for meaning in a world that feels nihilistic. It helps that this first experiment with the form features Matt. His inherent spiritualism gives credence to all the events that play out, and the religious overtones, imagery, and symbolism play out at every single level. Hell, the episode even ends with Matt protecting a couple of GR members from hoodlums who harass them. As a result, he takes a rock to the head (let he who is without sin…) and wakes up in the hospital three days later (he doesn’t know it’s three days, but that was also the time between Christ’s death and his resurrection). Those three days cost him everything, making it too late to save his church by the bank-imposed deadline. The new proprietors? The Guilty Remnant.

So… Matt took the punishment for the GR’s sins and for that they stab him in the back? Unbelievable.

A better place

The real star of the season, though (and one of the series’ high points, really) is “Guest”, an episode that does “Two Boats and a Helicopter” only for Nora Durst (Carrie Coon). It is an incredible, unbelievable episode of television. Where the Matt episode might have been a “hey this is a fun way to tell a story” concept, this is one that fundamentally changes the way that Lindelof makes television. You can draw a line from this through the next two seasons of The Leftovers, into half the episodes of Watchmen, and who knows how many episodes of Lindelof’s upcoming Lanterns series.

Nora Durst is a brilliant character, the strongest on the show. Her claim to fame is the Sudden Departure taking her husband and two children while leaving her behind. In this episode she puts the odds of that as 1 in 128,000. Prior to this episode, she’s appeared intermittently as a side character, but mostly because of her position as that statistic. This status affects her entire life, and this episode showcases the sad, never-moving-on life she’s been living for three years.

Everything in the episode points to this argument. Nora works for the Department of the Sudden Departure and asks individuals a questionniare designed to determine whether or not governmental insurance should pay out their claim regarding their departed loved one. She attends a Departures-based conference every year (as she does in this episode) and has “legacy” status, meaning she gets stickers on her badge and gets to appear on a panel. Here, her pain and grief can mean something. It can make her unique and mean something beyond what she is experiencing.

Only… everything goes wrong. Someone steals her badge and she’s forced to wear one that says “Guest”, robbing her of her status and putting her in an anonymous state (she throws an appropriate hissy fit). This, of course, works out when she gets roped into others who don’t have the same Departure hangups she has. She goes to a party, drinks, does drugs, and makes out with the cute boy’s Life Model Decoy. She gets a status back, but still finds herself empty. She tracks down and overturns her imposter. She fights with a popular author who she deems unworthy of relating to her pain. She comes across Holy Wayne, who gives her his special hug and removes the burdens of her grief. And she finally gets a different answer when she asks it to one of the recipients from her questionnaire. All of these moments (every single one) feel seismic.

Carrying this entire episode is the magnificent Carrie Coon. It’s mindblowing that this is one of her first film/television roles, because she completely devours every scene, bringing to life a character on the page who could be that aforementioned statistic or sad sack and is instead a coiled ball of despair. Coon actualizes the pain, rage, and victimhood into a fully realized character. It also completely re-centers the show’s narrative. Before this, Nora was barely a recurring character. Now, she is a character the audience fully and completely understands. From here on out, every scene with Nora is more potent. She’s dynamite.

All A-Story

Other episodes of television have operated like this. Day-in-the-life episodes are quite common and every major show that lasts a decent amount of time will eventually sidebar to explore an off-the-beaten-path character before jumping back to the ongoing business as usual. Though when this show attempts this it doesn’t quite work. The two best episodes of this season layer motifs and imagery in every scene, where all of these strange, abstract instances carry mythic import because all of these characters are so lost and searching for meaning. It’s much easier to track all of the tapestry’s threads when the audience’s mind is not pulled in other directions.

There are other runners through various episodes that try to play with this. The most obvious one is the missing baby Jesus doll from the Nativity scene in “B.J. and the A.C.”, where Kevin’s interactions with this particular mystery feeds into his themes of trying to keep his family together on his own terms. But it feels muddled when the show is pulling itself between Kevin, Jill, Laurie, and Tom. Of lesser note is the in “Penguin One, Us Zero,” when Kevin’s bagel goes missing in the toaster oven. It’s really hard to track the significance of that rushed runner without a concerted focus on all its strange implications.

Moving forward Lindelof realizes that “Two Boats and a Helicopter” and “Guest” were incredible for a reason. It allowed him the opportunity to dive deep into incredible characters and pull out what makes them tick. On the downside, this means that there are two whole episodes in the season that only minorly push the narrative forward (and “Guest” hardly does any). Only… the season finale reveals that the grand narrative itself was hardly some grand opera the show was building to. On LOST the stakes were life and death. On The Leftovers, it’s all more intimate and mundane. What need the overarching story?

All of this makes the first season of The Leftovers a fascinating curio. The show might be playing with similar themes after this season, but it radically transforms the way it tells its stories. Moving forward, the series can do crazy shit like season two’s “No Room At the Inn” or season three’s “Certified” (and so many others). Without this lesson we don’t get Watchmen’s “She Was Killed By Space Junk” or “This Extraordinary Being”. It’s a remarkable thing to watch as one of the best writers around learns something in real time and adapts an entirely new mode to better suit the stories he wants to tell.

What other shows even have “best episode ever” contenders and then try to replicate that strange alchemy into the ongoing format for the show. The rest of the series is Lindelof playing with the “A-Stories only” format to remarkable success. Revisiting it knowing where it goes, it makes the times when Lindelof isn’t playing in that space all the more frustrating. Sometimes, though, we have to learn how not to tell stories in order to figure out how to tell better ones. Sometimes, it just happens to be in a hard-to-watch season that scares off its audience almost immediately. Damn shame, that. But the longer time goes on, the more undeniable those last two glorious seasons become.