The Leftovers: Season 1 (2014)

One of the challenges faced by recent apocalyptic television has been to envisage an event that’s sufficiently catastrophic to change perceptions of late capitalism as it now stands, but not decimating enough to destroy the world in the process. Where cinema lends itself to endless spectacles of death and destruction, television has started to come to terms with an even more elusive, powerful, apocalyptic prospect – a change of mindset in the midst of all the the infrastructure, character types and quotidian detail that still surrounds us. Longform television, in particular, is quite attuned to this prospect of an apocalypse played out in the present – and The Leftovers feels like one of the first series to try and turn this niche into a vehicle for “quality” television. Based on the bestselling novel by Tom Perrotta, it takes place in a near-future – or near-present – in which 2% of the world’s population has suddenly and mysteriously vanished. There’s no gore, bloodshed or spectacle – just an absence – while Perrotta and co-creator Damon Lindelof have made it clear that the reasons for the vanishing will never be explained. Instead, the series plays out as an ensemble study in characters coming to terms with a gradual, systemic lack of confidence in the world surrounding them (the series opens three years after the vanishing, once it’s become part of everyday life), as well as a kind of ideological or motivational void where they hadn’t even registered ideology or motivation operating before. As might be expected, that produces quite a fractured, atonal palette – at some level, the point is that there’s nothing left to ensemble or assemble around – as well as a kind of high point in recent horror television, or at least recent uncanny television, insofar as our most familiar assumptions and patterns of identification are somewhat defamiliarised and estranged. If it’s sometimes – or always - sententious, sophomoric and self-serious, then that’s because that’s the only reflex or register these characters really have for dealing with a catastrophe that seems to have displaced their normal patterns of identification as well, forcing them to become audiences to their own lives, debilitating their ability to even engage or convince each other for any great length of time.