20/20: #11 The Leftovers, Season 1

[Like the "10 for 10" series but a little longer.  It's my endeavor to clean the backlog slate (with some things watched well over a year ago now) this month with 20 reviews written in 20 minutes (each) over 20 days...
...Well...
After a 20 day break, I'm back to fulfil the last 10 of this failed 20/20 run.] 

I don't remember where I read it (probably the AV Club), but there was a poll of prominent TV critics, reviewing the 2016/2017 television season, and listing out the best/favourite of the bunch.  The Leftovers made the top of the list for its third and final season.

I had heard about The Leftovers from a bunch of different people and sources, but David's review had always influenced my impression of it.  Heavy and depressing were most often the terms I heard referencing this show, set in a world where 3% of the population one day just disappears, and what follows after.  I was expecting some Rabbit Hole or Manchester By The Sea-type heaviness, but finally launching into it I was instead faced with a weird sci-fi-esque alt-reality, where there's two very different kinds of cults (one which follows a sort of faith healer, the other a group that take a vow of silence and poverty and absolution from all feeling) and numerous people just trying to figure out how to cope in this world, including the sheriff of Mapleton, NY, his daughter, his stepson, his wife, the town reverend, a woman who lost her entire family and a few others.  I found it far more intriguing than depressing.  There's some world building at play, things that would or could only happen in a reality like this, but also things that are logical extensions of how our world operates today.

Symbolism abounds, much of which makes more sense emotionally than logically.  Religious symbolism particularly has a strange place in the show, as it's quite clear this wasn't "the Rapture" but some other phenomenon.  There's no easy answers, to be sure, and certainly traditional religion tries to help but it can't ease troubled minds.  Psychology fares no better.  The show strives for you to understand all the main characters' viewpoints, to empathize with them if not always maintaining your sympathy as a result of their actions.  There's a lot of lashing out, a lot of displaced anger, confusion, hurt, and especially guilt. 

If anything, it seems remarkably clear that the show is a metaphor for depression, in its many different manifestations.  Everyone in the show is afflicted with it in some form or another, manifesting in different ways, dealt with (or not dealt with) in different ways.  As David said in his review, the show just provides a trigger for it, but not necessarily a cause.  If the flashback episode 9 shows anything, it's that the melancholy was there even prior to the event.  The Leftovers provides an outlet for the purveying sense of existential dread, and doesn't seek to provide answers for getting past it.  If anything, season one shows that it's always a struggle, there are no short cuts, no easy answers, but that the possibility that it can get better does exist.

This is a fascinating show, amazingly acted (Ann Dowd is the MVP as Patti, leader of the local Guilty Remnant), clever and complex.  Season one leaves a few threads dangling, but I hear that the first episode of season 2 is where the show goes from being fascinating to essential viewing by taking off into drastically divergent terrain.  I'm looking forward to it.

I'm just hoping we don't get a flashback episode explaining where Chief Garvey's big back tattoo came from (this being a show co-created by Lost's Damon Lindleof, afterall)