Losing a loved one brings pain no matter the circumstances. Not knowing what happened to them only adds more agony. That grief and confusion is what propels The Leftovers, but on a global scale—leading to three fascinating, thought-provoking, audacious, cigarette-filled, and often miraculous seasons of TV.
At the start of the first episode, it happens: two percent of the world’s population vanishes into thin air. The amount of missing isn’t huge, but it’s significant. The people who lost someone dear are personally wounded, but nobody escapes being touched in some way by the event, which leaves humanity with an infuriating array of mystical questions. Why did those who left get “chosen”—and why were those who didn’t go get left behind? Was God or some other cosmic being involved? Where did they go? Will they ever come back? And will it happen again?
As the anniversary of the show’s “Sudden Departure” approaches—October 14, unless you’re in Australia, in which case it’s October 15—and the levels of existential dread in our own world continue to rise, it felt like just the right moment for a rewatch.
Created by Damon Lindelof (course-correcting with a successfully enigmatic story after Lost’s unsatisfying end) and Tom Perrotta (who wrote the source-material novel), The Leftovers ran from 2014-2017 on HBO. Justin Theroux, Carrie Coon, Christopher Eccleston, Amy Brenneman, Liv Tyler, Regina King, Jovan Adepo, Margaret Qualley, Scott Glenn, Kevin Carroll, and the almighty Ann Dowd anchored its core cast, with many other memorable players popping up in its ensemble along the way.
Welcome to Mapleton
Season one is set in Mapleton, New York—a small town with pockets of dysfunction like any other place—three years after the Sudden Departure.
Throughout its run, The Leftovers’ storytelling made great use of flashbacks, flash-forwards, and events replayed from different points of view. This patchwork approach extended across seasons—even in season three, for instance, we’d get glimpses of life before the Sudden Departure—bringing valuable insights into character motivations and perspectives, particularly useful on a show where reality sometimes meant different things to different people.
It also set up points that paid off sometimes years later in the show’s timeline and did wonders to avoid plot holes, even as The Leftovers kept the answers to its biggest questions carefully ambiguous.
In Mapleton, we meet the Garveys—police officer Kevin Jr. (Theroux) and his teenage daughter Jill (Qualley), and his estranged wife, Laurie (Brenneman). Kevin Sr. (Glenn) has been institutionalized after a breakdown following the Sudden Departure; he claims to hear voices, and the viewer soon suspects that Kevin Jr., who has blackouts and strange visions, may have inherited a similar mental illness… or perhaps an ability of a more metaphysical nature.
Tom (Chris Zylka), Laurie’s son from an earlier relationship, has moved west and is working for a self-styled holy man, a highly marketable calling in the world’s new climate of uncertainty.
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