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Lessons From “The Leftovers”
“What’s a person to us / but a contortion / of pressure ridges / palpable / long after she is gone?” — Rae Armantrout, ‘Missing Persons’
“Apparently even the most awful tragedies, and the people they’d ruined, got a little stale after a while.” — Tom Perrotta, The Leftovers
The Leftovers begins not at the moment of the Sudden Departure, when 2% of the world’s population suddenly disappeared without a trace, but rather in its aftermath. Created by Damon Lindelof of Lost and Watchmen fame, The Leftovers ran from 2014 to 2017, a piece of information that was, frankly, surprising to learn when I first started watching the show in 2021. Released almost a decade before a global pandemic that would upend our lives, the show’s thematic grappling with grief, faith, and collective trauma eerily parallels our current moment.
Set almost three years later in the nondescript town of Mapleton, New York, the show follows the fractured Garvey family: Kevin Garvey is trying to keep it together as the local chief of police; his wife Laurie abandoned her husband and kids for a silent, white-robed, nihilistic chain-smoking cult known as the Guilty Remnant; their son Tommy ran away from their small town to follow Holy Wayne, an enigmatic guru known for his healing hugs; and their daughter Jill is navigating teenage life with her father in their broken home. Then…
