It took five patient days of waiting, but my big blasting boy John Maher — my best friend, co-editor, and the target of my shameless week-long trolling on the site we ostensibly run together — has finally responded to #JohnWithTheWind. If you think I feel incredibly accomplished, you thought correct.
The week’s winding down, and while there’s plenty of fine live-action television that John hasn’t seen that we haven’t talked about (don’t worry, I’m keeping a “Star Trek Month” idea in my back pocket), there’s an important, deftly directed series that just wrapped up its final episodes a month ago and that we absolutely need to address. It’s called The Leftovers. Its entire three-season run clocks in at less than 30 hours, it hits you with emotional gut shots left and right, and — most importantly — it revolves around concepts that we can all consider universal, but that will resonate especially with John Hughes Maher III, specifically in how it handles loss, abandonment, mental health, and interpersonal relationships.
That last one’s important to John. I know that because I’m his best friend, but I also know that because as his best friend, I know exactly how much he cares about his cohort. Look at his fucking rebuttal to a week of content dedicated to his friends trolling him. A pattern will emerge: the exact phrase “thanks to [insert friend or family member]” appears no less than 16 times. The piece is packaged as a list of shows he’s watched, but John really turned it into an acknowledgements page for his friendship-fueled consumption of all the live-action television he’s ever watch. John’s probably going to be embarrassed when he reads this, and there’s a chance he’ll go to edit it out, but then think better of it before he does, but then go to consult me once he reads it, but then I’ll tell him I don’t care, because I’ve said this for years: John cares a lot about about the people who he chooses to surround himself with—often too much. He loves them and that love is real.
That brings us to The Leftovers. John, it’s a television show that asks: What if 2 percent of those people you love…suddenly disappeared? Without any remotely reasonable explanation. It’s a thematic complement and (exponentially dramatically superior) spiritual successor to the show Lost — a series also co-created by Damon Lindelof. Unlike Lost, The Leftovers focuses on the people left behind, and unlike every show or book or movie that’s pulled this trick before, it pulls it off beautifully. It manages that not just in kickass acting from a mostly naked Justin Theroux and a stoic chameleon named Carrie Coon, or between the treble clefs of a Max Richter score that could slay dragons, or through a frenetic plot that somehow bursts out of a tiny town in New York and eventually shuttles out west before settling in Australia. It does it instead with careful, exacting writing that takes the extremely simple, happy lives of ordinary people and robs them — suddenly and without explanation — of their family and friends. Those simple lives explode into complication, disarray, and mountains of trauma. Somehow, miraculously, the material is all treated with the dignity and gravitas such a chaos requires, and frankly I’ve never seen any piece of art handle the pain quite as effectively.
I don’t recommend it offhandedly. It’s heavy, but it’s also not dour. It’s masterful, but it’s also not perfect (nothing is, after all, except for Hayao Miyazaki). It’s funny, sometimes, but its humor isn’t the main sell. The best part of it all is that The Leftovers will keep you guessing. Even at its weirdest, its characters remain consistent, and their actions never insult The Leftovers audience’s intelligence as so many shows, including Lost and, more recently, Game of Thrones, have managed to do so many times over. Like Lost, however, its finale—like all the good finales—is somewhat subject to interpretation. I recommend this show to you knowing you and also having elected a positive, life-affirming interpretation.
Before you ever get there, though, its twists and turns are more than reward enough. I refuse to spoil any more of it. Just watch the damn show.
Thanks for reading The Dot and Live — a pop-up site about live-action TV. Don’t forget to ❤ this article and follow us on Twitter and Facebook.
