‘The Leftovers’: HBO Series Won’t Focus On Answers
HBO’s newest show isn’t about getting to the bottom of things. The Leftovers is more about how people are dealing with the program’s central mystery, more than finding out why The Leftovers are The Leftovers.
Considering the showrunner for this new program is Damon Lindelof, who is best known as the man behind Lost, it might seem as though the show will eventually give the answers people are looking for from the plot.
The Leftovers is based on a book by the same name written by Tom Perotta. Viewers won’t find answers they are looking for in there either, but if legendary horror writer Stephen King can be taken at his word, those who watch the new series will see a very good show.
King said the story was “the best ‘Twilight Zone’ episode you never saw — not ‘The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street’ but ‘The Monsters Are Us in Mapleton.’?” According to The New York Daily News, that is all it took to hook Lindelof into making the book into a series.
The series is set to focus around the events of the actual rapture, where two percent of the population just up and disappears. The Leftovers focuses on the people who were left behind and how they are dealing with the event three years later.
Some people, such as Justin Theroux‘s character, are trying to get on with their lives and carry on as if nothing has happened. Theroux’s character is also dealing with the fact that he might be losing his mind, the same way his father did before him.
If that’s not bad enough, The Leftovers also has a cult, called the Guilty Remnant. This group wears all white and smokes cigarettes while being generally creepy and attempting to recruit others to their cause.
“The people in the Guilty Remnant are saying, ‘We’re separating ourselves from human connection because the Sudden Departure has revealed that to be an impossible thing. In a world where anyone can disappear at any moment, there’s just no sense in being connected,'”
Perotta told TV Guide that The Leftovers also features a character who is claiming that he can heal other Leftovers simply by giving him a hug. There is also a minister who is hellbent on proving that the departures are actually not part of the Rapture, because evil people were taken as well.
Despite the minister’s quest to find answers, the story focuses on the people who are indeed The Leftovers and has left out finding the big answer to the big question.
