HBO’s Rapture Drama Asked What Happens to Those Who Stay Behind

HBO’s The Leftovers arrived on June 29, 2014, with a premise built to frustrate anyone who wanted answers. Three years before the series opens, 140 million people — 2% of the world’s population — vanished at once. The event has a name, the Sudden Departure, and a date, October 14, 2011. It does not have an explanation, and the show, created by Damon Lindelof and Tom Perrotta from Perrotta’s 2011 novel, never pretends one is coming.

That is the deal it offers. What follows is not a mystery to be solved. It is a study of the people who did not make the cut, and of the strange religions and stranger cults they build to fill the silence.

Trailer, via HBO.

Kevin Garvey and the Town of Mapleton

Season one stays in Mapleton, New York, a fictional town where the chief of police is Kevin Garvey, played by Justin Theroux. His family has come apart in the ways the Departure made ordinary. His wife, Laurie (Amy Brenneman), has joined the Guilty Remnant. His son, Tommy (Chris Zylka), has left home to follow Holy Wayne, a man who views himself as the Second Coming of Jesus Christ. His daughter, Jill, is acting out.

Around them, the show sets two other anchors. Nora Durst (Carrie Coon) is a grieving widow. Her brother, Reverend Matt Jamison (Christopher Eccleston), is a minister working through his own trauma. Both are adjusting to life post-Departure, which is to say they are not adjusting at all.

The Guilty Remnant is the season’s clearest invention. Its members wear white, smoke constantly, and hold to a nihilism that the show treats as both ridiculous and completely reasonable. The town’s conflict with the group runs through the season, and Meg Abbott’s slow seduction into the Mapleton faction, led by Patti Levin, gives that conflict a face.

Jarden, Texas, and the Murphy Family

The second season moves the whole thing to Jarden, Texas, a fictional town where not one citizen was lost in the Sudden Departure. The show calls this a miracle, then spends the season asking what a miracle is worth to the people standing outside it.

The Murphys take over as the new focal point. John Murphy (Kevin Carroll) is the town’s chief firefighter, and he acts as a vigilante deterrent against people trying to exploit Jarden’s reputation. His wife, Erika (Regina King), is a doctor. Their son, Michael (Jovan Adepo) is an aspiring pastor. Their daughter, Evie is a high school student with epilepsy.

Kevin, Nora, and Matt move to Jarden. The show does not treat the move as a fresh start. It treats it as the same grief in a new house, with a town that has decided its luck makes it better than everyone else.

• Mapleton, New York: the season one setting, where Kevin Garvey is chief of police
• Jarden, Texas: the season two and three setting, where no one departed
• The Guilty Remnant: white-clothed, chain-smoking nihilists, led in Mapleton by Patti Levin
• Holy Wayne’s followers: a cult built around a man who calls himself the Second Coming
• The Murphy family: John, Erika, Michael and Evie, the new focal point in Jarden

A Cast That Keeps Changing Shape

Casting began in June 2013. Theroux, Liv Tyler, Eccleston, Ann Dowd, Amanda Warren, Michael Gaston and Coon were announced for the pilot. The pilot itself was written by Lindelof and Perrotta and directed by Peter Berg.

For season two, eight of the 14 main cast members from season one returned. Emily Meade, Amanda Warren, Annie Q., Max Carver, Charlie Carver and Michael Gaston did not. The new Murphy family was cast in April 2015, with Carroll, King and Adepo as series regulars. Darius McCrary came aboard in a recurring role as Isaac Rayney, John’s friend and a palm reader, and Steven Williams played Virgil, a confidant of Kevin’s. Janel Moloney, who had a recurring role in season one as Mary Jamison, was promoted to regular.

For season three, the entire main cast from season two returned except Dowd. Scott Glenn and Jasmin Savoy Brown were promoted to series regulars, though Brown stayed a recurring guest star and appeared in three episodes. Lindsay Duncan joined on December 6, 2016, as a recurring guest star, appearing in five episodes. Liv Tyler appears in one scene in the first episode and returns for one subsequent appearance.

HBO renewed the show for a second season, then for a third and final one on December 10, 2015, at Lindelof’s request so he could conclude it. The third season ran from April 16, 2017, to June 4, 2017. Across three seasons, 28 episodes aired.

What the First Season Gets Wrong

The first season drew mostly positive reviews, and one negative review called the series “clunky” and unsubtle. That criticism lands. The show’s first year is often a blunt instrument, and its interest in misery can read as a pose rather than a method.

The second season is where the critical reevaluation happened, and the reason is structural. Moving to Jarden gives the show a real subject: a community that believes its survival means something, surrounded by people who know it does not. The Murphys are a better engine than the Garveys ever were, because John Murphy’s rage is specific. He is not sad about the world. He is angry at the people who come to his town to cash in on it.

The show’s weakness is the same in every season. It is very good at building dread and very reluctant to spend it. The Guilty Remnant, Holy Wayne, the palm reader, the epilepsy, the white clothes and the cigarettes — these are images that promise meaning and then decline to deliver it. That is the point, and the point wears thin.

The Score

The Leftovers is a serious, well-acted show that mistakes withholding for depth, and it is better when it stops doing that. The second season is the strongest, and the reason is not that it explains more. It is that it finally gives its grief a place to stand.

Theroux and Coon carry the weight, and Coon in particular turns Nora Durst into the show’s clearest argument: that the people left behind are the story, not the ones who went. Eccleston’s Matt Jamison is the show’s conscience, and Carroll’s John Murphy is its temper. The ensemble is the reason to stay.

But a 6.5 is a fair score, and it is fair for a specific reason. The Leftovers asks what people do when the answer never comes, then repeats the question for 28 episodes with only occasional interest in what the answers might be. It is a show about the aftermath of an inexplicable event that is itself often inexplicable by choice. That is a legitimate artistic position. It is also a limit.

The first season is a rough draft of the idea. The second season is the idea. The third season is a long goodbye that earns some of its length and not all of it. Three seasons was the right call, made at the right time, by a creator who asked to end it rather than stretch it.

6.5 of 10.

Carrie Coon · Damon Lindelof · HBO · Justin Theroux · The Leftovers · TV Review