Damon Lindelof and Tom Perotta‘s The Leftovers, which I watched last night on HBO, is about a community of sad, numbed-out souls in a small New York State town experiencing something between a stasis of the spirit and a combination slow-motion freakout and behavioral meltdown over the sudden disappearance of 2% of the world’s population, or roughly 140,000,000 people. I didn’t like it that much. The show, I mean. Or the premise, for that matter. I felt intrigued from time to time, but mostly I felt irritated and underfuckingwhelmed.
It’s not so much that relatively little is “explained” or even discussed in any kind of half-comprehensive way, although it’s a standard technique for a drama about a cataclysmic event (The Day The Earth Caught Fire, On The Beach, The Rapture, Godzilla) to have an authority figure arrive around the 30-minute mark and deliver a bitter or drunken assessment of the whys and wherefores. But all we’re given along these lines is a CNN glimpse of a Congressional hearing with one guy claiming that “God sat this one out” — obviously a questionable assertion.
All we’re told is that a lot of characters are feeling rather sullen or nihilistic about being left behind. A lot of people are smoking and drinking and unshaven and saying “fuck it” in various ways. Packs of feral dogs running around and being shot by gun nuts. And a lot of Godhead types and visionary eccentrics are enjoying a newfound power.