The Leftovers

I'm not sure how I have managed it, but somehow I have stumbled onto a binging heaven situation that I am groveling in like a pig in mud.  When I moved over here to Sinkhole Estates I bought a Roku tick and am scabbing Netflix (Kenzie), HBO Now (the current Mrs. Blythe) and I have an Amazon Prime membership.  I've never had the opportunity to view all this great stuff available so I am dizzy with anticipation.  

The past couple of weeks I binged on something so remarkable it is challenging Breaking Bad as the best I've ever seen.  TV drama, like music, art and politics, is such a subjective medium that I hesitate to write this review, let alone recommend it.  In fact, let me start out by saying maybe you guys shouldn't watch it.  Most of you will never make it through the 28 episodes so why waste your time?   Rotten Tomatoes gave it a score of 81% its first year, 93% its second, and 98% in its final one.   

The show is HBO's The Leftovers.  Season 1 starts in fictional Mapleton, New York after a rapture-like event takes 2% of the world's population.   The town's police chief's wife has left him to join a cult-like national group called the Guilty Remnant, designed to keep the towns people to remember those they lost.  He lives with his daughter while his son is helping protect a Jesus-figure's pregnant disciple.  See, I told you you'd never make it.  If you decide to go further and get hooked, and you will, you will meet Patty Levine, the GR leader, the Chief's dad who was also the chief and now resides in a loony bin because voices keep talking to him.  By the way this character is played by Scott Glenn who steals every scene he is in.  

Some families were spared, others like the Chiefs new wife lost both kids and her husband.  She is the most fucked up, as you'd expect, and it shows.  She holds it together like old Velcro that is looking its hooking power.   

If you make it through Season One get ready for a continuing transcendent arc that will leave you stunned, laughing and scratching your head.  Like a dog watching Shawshank.

Season 2 moves us out of Mapleton to a place called Jarden, Texas with most of the main characters intact.  If you thought the first season was loopy, get ready for the 2nd.  Here, we have dreams, flashbacks, flash forwards, a New Gospel written about our main character, the police chief ("...because Matt thought the New Testament was getting old."), and a really weird two segment thing called, International Assassin."  

Let's assume you even begin to watch this, and let's further assume that you make it to the third season, then you will be, as far as I'm concerned, pretty darn headstrong, stubborn, like train wrecks or simply captivated by the other dimensionality of it all.  We travel now to Australia where pops has to learn the song of an aboriginal bluesman to ward off the Apocalypse everyone is coming on the 7th anniversary of the original departure.  Again, all the characters, more or less make the trip, along with their ghosts, and the surreal aspects get more surreal.    

Perhaps you are enjoying the male frontal nudity or the female frontal nudity or maybe even the story itself.  Myself, well, I majored in philosophy and theology in college and this is the only thing that I have ever seen that incorporates both fields, except Ingmar Bergman's The Seventh Seal.   Big ideas, big weirdness, and huge payoff.  

But its not only about those things and more, it also is about people, and how we react, change, feel, about ourselves and loss.  It is first and foremost an extremely entertaining study of how life changes for us when we lose those we love.  It is funny, sad, heart wrenching, thought provoking, deep, shallow and everything in between.  Don't watch it.  It takes too much out of you - it demands that you pay attention, it demands loyalty and it demands your human frailty.  Keep watching Will and Grace or Young Sheldon if you like blinders, fluff, and nothing more meaningful than a commercial about Musinex.  Keep watching The Leftovers and it will make a deal with you may not be willing to make.  It will entrance and entertain but you pay a price: it will leave a mark not easily removed.  You will be forced to think between the tears; nothing will quite be the same after its ending credits.

   

Vulture Magazine declared The Leftovers the 2nd best TV show of 2017.  Look up the HBO rankings of all their stuff and you'll find it around the number 20 area.   My personal rankings have Breaking Bad at the top then probably Shameless.  Followed by Fargo (TV series, West Wing, Sopranos, The Wire, and floating around is always Lonesome Dove.  But now I have to shoehorn Leftovers in here somewhere.

    

The final episode tries to put it all in perspective and answer the questions of all the strange things that have happened, but it is too late.  The horses have left the barn, or is it they have disappeared?  The searing images, the scenes, the images that you have watched for 28 episodes have done their worse:  you'll be drenched in ideas and themes too big for our simple lives.  The Leftovers:  indescribable,  majestic, human, thought-provoking, ethereal, weird, and quite simply one of the best I've ever seen.