For years now, one of my goals has been to stage a rewatch of the HBO drama series The Leftovers. On the surface that sounds like a done deal. All it really takes is roughly 30 hours over any period and a commitment to stare forward, consuming the visuals one by one. In theory, watching The Leftovers should be easy – but it’s also been one that I’ve been putting off for at least two years now.
If the Damon Lindelof-penned show has any reputation among polite society, it’s that it’s the most depressing, merciless show to grace cable during the 2010s. Criticism is warranted, especially when it opens with a scene that is so traumatic that I’ve thought about it every week since. There is something about the bleakness of The Leftovers that cannot just be simply consumed. No, you need to have a certain sense of moral character to enter the show without losing yourself. Every kind of frank discussion around mental health will be had. The worst feelings you’ve ever experienced may come up. So much exists around the stigma of watching it that part of me was grateful to watch it week to week with enough respite in the six-day interim.
So the question ultimately shifts to something more pragmatic: why even rewatch it? It sounds like I’m just setting myself up for misery and a bad time. Very true. There’s a lot that I’m bracing for even revisiting the opening scene that actively represents a personal fear I’ve carried my entire life. The feeling of abandonment is so overwhelming. Can I handle the thought of half the population disappearing, leaving behind “The Guilty Remnants” and giving us nothing but time to think about why we weren’t chosen?
The reluctance to rewatch sort of stems from that idea. Five years ago this December, the world entered a global pandemic that hasn’t fully healed itself. I spent 2020 ensconced at home, away from a deadly virus. The idea of half the population dying stopped being fiction to me. As hospitals had record high numbers with 0% capacity and ambulances were turning away sick people strategically, something was debilitating about the time that took me three years to recover from. Even then, COVID-19 remains a serious concern and nobody should take it lightly. 2020 to early 2021 marks easily the worst depression I’ve ever experienced, and I was very unkind to myself.
So why rewatch The Leftovers at all? A concern that it will just thrust me back into that state reads as inevitable. To be fair, it is why I would go a few months and assess “Am I ready?” and come away thinking “Not yet.” I knew that there would be a need to express vulnerabilities in a manner that required a certain strength I didn’t have. And yet, I wanted to do it in part because I wanted to know if experiencing those strong emotions would enhance things. I also wanted to sort of atone for the first time I saw the series.
There’s a fun Lindelof-ian irony to how The Leftovers played into my life. The premiere episode debuted the Sunday after my sister’s wedding. I remember sitting in the living room watching the extra-long runtime as the lingering parties out back talked and enjoyed the festivities. Something was daunting about it, but more importantly, I don’t think audiences were ready for a “dark” Lindelof show. He had just completed Lost and certain expectations were popping up left and right. Where was the symbolism, the mystery box storytelling that would unlock some greater truth? I sort of wanted to make fun of it less because of what it was doing and more because of who Lindelof was. I had a friend who got mad at me for saying I liked his interview on The Nerdist because he screwed up Lost. To her, it was inevitable that he would do it again.
For those three seasons, I watched every week becoming transformed from the skeptic into the unapologetic fan. The irony was that for as dour as it was, my life had been halfway decent up to that point. By the time it ended in 2017, I was attempting to get my life back together and had this fresh sense of optimism after several years of uncertainty. It felt like the narrative reflected something similar. These were characters who clearly suffered from trauma but had learned to live with it. That third season was a profound mix of darkness with plot lines that could be suggested as downright screwball. Lindelof had made his masterpiece, and I think it’s only rewarding to those who started when the show was downright stomach-churning.
But the irony of The Leftovers airing from 2014-2017 is because of that wedding. Without going into specifics, they were the typical young couple who had their ups and downs. I’d visit them in San Diego, and it felt like they had some semblance of a life figured out. In 2016, they had twins and were planning the next stage of life.
And yet, less than two months after The Leftovers aired their finale, they had a notorious break-up. The police were involved. A knife was pulled on my sister by a side party. He left town while we did our best to restart. It’s the type of moment that’s caused my sister to cope by spending her wedding anniversary calling on friends to distract her.
But because of that night involving the police, the dominoes fell in line with my birthday. Everything fell apart and I was left on July 8, 2017, thinking my dad had driven off to kill himself. He’s still with us, but the reality was that for a solid year, I couldn’t trust anyone. It was the start of a period between 2017 and 2022 where I experienced way too many tragedies to recount here. The timing was terrible, meaning I started my 30s with a very unpromising worldview. Everyone was dying. Marriages fell apart. American citizens were turning into terrorists. What did I have to look forward to? It’s a conflict that took me until late last year to fully piece together as one continual bludgeon, but one thing was clear… I missed my old and more optimistic self.
So, The Leftovers exists in a perpetual state of irony. It was in some respect ahead of its time for me. I wasn’t ready to witness the stories it was sharing no matter how much I wanted to believe I loved sad media. For those few years, my life was comparatively okay. I was in my Mid-20s and planning for a better future. The happy loving couple had their problems, but you believed they would work things out. I suppose on some level, that’s a byproduct of The Obama Administration providing a naïve sense of “Hope.” That, or I was just young and needing the next phase of life to be better than a dead-end job.
For these reasons and more, The Leftovers remained this nebulous force that never fully escaped my consciousness. There is something about the show that always pulls me back, asking me to think about some component of it. Odd character beats will cross my mind. I’ll think of the boat parties, the hotel sprinkler system going off to A-Ha, the story of old fridges locking children inside, or how the Regina Spektor song finally convinced me this show knew what it was doing. Not everything (or anything) comes back to the wedding, but the symbolism remains. In my mind, it exists in this purer, happier time that strangely felt comforting. It was when I could explore emotions without fear of being ravaged. I could make fun of them because I was inexperienced. In some ways, I regret that because it feels like it trivializes my enjoyment of the show, but then again, did I really know better?
The desire to rewatch The Leftovers comes with a morbid curiosity that I can’t fully explain. I was tempted to do an episode-by-episode recap like I did for Euphoria, but then I realized they may end up just becoming diaries of where I was at the time. Would I really be engaging with the series in the correct ways? In theory, there’s no wrong way to rewatch a TV series, but I want to believe that allowing myself to revisit season one for the first time in a decade will produce a new feeling in me. Maybe this will become the greatest HBO series I have ever seen. It’s already high up the list, but whereas I rewatch The Sopranos, Deadwood, and The Wire with a soporific frequency, The Leftovers remains encapsulated in this amber that only shines brighter because of Lindelof’s equally impressive run on Watchmen. So for me, I will be watching slowly. Slow enough to not get burned out on difficult emotions while also allowing my mind to process what I have witnessed.
Because there’s so much that’s fantastic about the show which I hadn’t fully appreciated at the time. The ensemble is far richer than I’d given them credit for. Justin Theroux and Carrie Coon delivered two of the best performances I’ve seen on TV, but how much more did they do? Everything will hopefully feel new when I press play and discover a world full of despair before our own stumbled inward wholeheartedly. Maybe it will look familiar, or maybe it will still look like a tragicomic version of what I know. Something will give. I know that.
Most of all, I want to believe that I can appreciate the journey more. Having gone through my own extended journey of struggles, I understand that grief and pain aren’t a direct line. There will be days when I cry harder than I ever have before. Others, I will be laughing too hard. It’s what Lindelof and crew understood perfectly. While I think the first season alone would’ve marked it as a great show, the last two elevated it into the higher echelon. Suddenly you were seeing something gradual and richer than the average bummer drama. It was a sense of compassion and hope for the world to rebuild. It won’t fix what’s already broken, but it will hopefully build something new and meaningful.
Maybe it will be easier to watch because I know there are good days ahead. Even if the show far surpasses the Tom Perrotta novel, both share that sense of finding hope. I suppose if you’re like me and share a personality type that enjoys digging into complicated emotions in order to better understand them, this rewatch of The Leftovers makes sense. It’s not a quest to feel miserable about myself. It’s why it took so long to get here. Instead, I’m looking for ways to find meaning in a world that felt like it was tearing itself apart. It’s a silly thing to ask from a fictional series, but I think Lindelof understands that better than I ever could.
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