The Meaning of Life According to 'The Leftovers'
Damon Lindelof and Tom Perotta's supernatural drama intuited what worldwide trauma would feel like years before the pandemic, and showed connection forged in radical acceptance is all that matters.
In this series of posts, I’m looking at the ultimate messages of some of TV’s most meaningful shows.
The Leftovers is, in the end, a love story.
Yes, the story begins with gigantic, showy, worldwide event: a spontaneous rapture of sorts, the mysterious disappearance of 2 percent of the world’s population, with no clear pattern to who or how or why. In its wake come zealous cults, a small-town police chief who commits terrible crimes while sleepwalking, and an entire season that takes place in another town that’s celebrated because it’s the only place on earth where no one disappeared. And among it all, a lot of other weird shit happens.
But two scenes stick the most in my mind.
In one, the first season’s finale, that small-town police chief, Kevin, played by Justin Theroux, reveals to his new girlfriend, Nora, played by Carrie Coon, that he’s been sleepwalking and doing horrible things, including kidnapping a woman and driving her to suicide. She shrugs. “I hire prostitutes to shoot me,” she says. (She’s been doing this to cope since her entire family disappeared in the incident.) The truth on the table, they decide to stay together anyway.
I loved that scene when I first saw it. And I was struck by the way the ending of the entire series echoed it. In the third and final season finale, they’ve found each other after years apart. Nora tells a beyond-fantastical story about what happened to her when they split up, insisting that she literally visited another dimension where the departed had all gone, had seen her former family, and then had come back. We, as viewers, cannot tell if this is supposed to be “true” in the world of the show. Kevin cannot either.
But Kevin chooses to believe her. The important thing is that they’re together now.
Based on the Tom Perotta novel and adapted by the author and Lost co-creator Damon Lindelof for HBO, The Leftovers ran from 2014-17. It follows Kevin and Nora as they experience the aftershocks of the departure through the next several years—and even decades by the final moments of the finale. Those aftershocks are both mundane and supernatural, psychological and spiritual. Also often pretty damn weird, but always grounded in Theroux and Coon’s performances.
I didn’t watch The Leftovers until after the pandemic, and there’s no way for me to know what it felt like to watch the show in real time. What I do know is that post-pandemic, it felt so true. We lost a small amount of people, percentage wise, to covid, and yet the effects are still being felt to this very moment, in ways we never anticipated. But it feels like a show of our time—literally our time, not the time of ten years ago when it was airing. I find it hopeful because, against all odds, it has a tiny happy ending. I don’t know what’s going on for everyone else who lived through the departure at the point when the series ends, but I know these two people have found each other, and a way through.
It felt nearly impossible to reckon with the fact that this show ended before the pandemic. It knew, right? How did it get the PTSD of a planet-engulfing trauma so right? Perotta told my colleague Saul Austerlitz for a New York Times piece last year: “The TV shows that I was thinking about were like Walking Dead, where I was very aware of wanting to do something quite different: to do the least apocalyptic postapocalyptic story you could tell. Civilization seems to be intact, but something essential has been undermined, and people are in a state of profound bewilderment rather than struggling for survival.” It’s so prescient that he could see how this would feel; I know that I personally wouldn’t have guessed how it would feel until it happened to all of us. Part of me still doesn’t quite grasp that it happened.
After insane dips into consciousness, near-death-experiences, and a maybe trip to another dimension, the actual point of The Leftovers is this: Radical acceptance heals everything. A series that started out noticeably bleak—and often criticized as such—found redemption in love of a kind we rarely see onscreen. Messy, truthful, beleaguered, bold love. It finds its meaning in people. The only thing we have for sure, it tells us, is each other. As Tim Goodman wrote in The Hollywood Reporter as the first season ended, “To write a show that is essentially documenting what happens to people when they find out truth doesn’t really exist, faith is a vacuum, life may not have a purpose (do well and go to heaven, etc.), logic is a mug’s game and our time on earth is not just fleeting and unpredictable but meaningless, well hell—that’s truly bold. That’s worth watching.”
Other things I’ve written lately
A Dispatch from the Real-Life Creepy Town in ‘Severance’: Turns out I basically live in Kier, where HBO’s obsession-inducing series is set, because they’ve shot in a bunch of locations near my home in New York’s Hudson Valley. I take you on a tour of a bunch of them, from the birthing center and Woe's Hollow to Irv's apartment and the Great Doors factory. We also had a great finale discussion over on the Ministry of Pop Culture if you’re dying to overanalyze with fellow fans.
Celebrities, Stop Taking Our Jobs: Actually, my colleague
wrote this, but she quotes me, and it’s about how it’s getting harder all the time to do the job I do—cultural criticism and history—because celebrities are hoarding all their behind-the-scenes intel for podcasts that can’t provide much in the way of context or analysis. Thank you, Kirthana!
You're so right--this show was amazingly prescient. And love this: "Radical acceptance heals everything."
(And thanks for sharing the celeb podcast story, which you helped inspire!)