Plenty to chew over in terrific ‘Leftovers’
HBO’s “THE Leftovers” could be mentioned in the same sentence with “The Twilight Zone.” That’s as high as TV sci-fi praise gets.
That doesn’t mean “The Leftovers” is as good as the best of “The Twilight Zone.” It does mean it has that same unsettling aura and raises much more important issues than its specific story line.
One day, with no warning, 2% of the world’s population disappears. Just vanishes. A baby is crying in a car seat one minute. The next minute, gone.
Damon Lindelof, one of the brains behind “Lost,” created “The Leftovers” with novelist Tom Perrotta, and in a sense this is the flip side of his earlier series.
Where “Lost” followed a small group of people who have been separated from their old world, “The Leftovers” focuses on the people who are left behind — focusing, for story purposes, on the average small town of Mapleton.
Quite smartly, it picks up their story three years later. By now everyone realizes what has happened, and everyone has dealt with it differently, creating a combustible, barely repressed mixture of resignation, depression and fury.
Police Chief Kevin Garvey (Justin Theroux) seems to be one of the few able to step back and recognize this.
But he’s got his own problems. His wife, Laurie (Amy Brenneman), despairing over the disappearance of their son, has joined an eerie cult that dresses in white and refuses to speak. His daughter, Jill (Margaret Qualley), has layered this new conundrum on top of her standard teenage rebellion.
“The Leftovers” conveys nicely the difficulty of maintaining order, physical or psychological, in the wake of inexplicable mass trauma.
Some may see it as a shadow metaphor for the aftermath of Sept.11, but it really has more on its mind than that.
It’s worth watching even when it’s not easy.