NEW YORK, NY.- In “Guest,” an episode in the first season of the HBO drama “The Leftovers,” a woman named Nora Durst (Carrie Coon) approaches a disheveled self-proclaimed prophet named Holy Wayne (Paterson Joseph). She is looking for relief from the torment of her entire family disappearing in a Rapture-like event known as the Sudden Departure, and the prophet clutches her head and quotes from the Bible: “For whoever is joined with all the living, there is hope.”
These words from the book of Ecclesiastes are an ideal summation of the show, which premiered just over a decade ago, in June 2014. Created by Damon Lindelof and Tom Perrotta, based on Perrotta’s novel, the series tells a dark story about the aftermath of an inexplicable tragedy in which 2% of the world’s population vanishes. But it treats its characters with great care and (eventually) has a wicked, unexpected sense of humor. “The Leftovers” was always joined with all the living, intent on fanning the embers of hope.
When the show premiered, it was speculative fiction about an imagined catastrophe. Rewatching it now, it seems more like prophecy, foreseeing an emotional and corporeal reality the world experienced during the coronavirus pandemic. In separate interviews, Lindelof and Perrotta talked about the experience of creating the show, and the ways in which it anticipated our present. These are edited excerpts from the conversations.
Q: How did you two come to collaborate?
DAMON LINDELOF: I think it was 2012. I’m never going to do television again. I’ll never make another thing like “Lost,” so why even chase it? And then, as I was reading the book, I was like, “It’d be really cool to do this as a TV show.”
TOM PERROTTA: I said, “I’d really like to be in the writers' room and to have a significant role in writing the show.” But I knew that I needed somebody who could run the show.
Q: How did you envision the tone and style in the beginning?
LINDELOF: When you’re writing the show, you don’t sit down and say, “Here are the themes and ideas.” It is like if you’re getting fitted for eyeglasses, and you rest your chin in the machine, and they go, “This one or this one? Better or worse?”
PERROTTA: The TV shows that I was thinking about were like “Walking Dead,” where I was very aware of wanting to do something quite different: to do the least apocalyptic postapocalyptic story you could tell. Civilization seems to be intact, but something essential has been undermined, and people are in a state of profound bewilderment rather than struggling for survival.
LINDELOF: Peter Berg came on board to direct the pilot, and we’d always talked about the show having a “Friday Night Lights” aesthetic. He has multiple cameras, and they’re not told exactly what to get. It feels a lot less stagy and more organic. And that was the same aesthetic we wanted to attach to the actors. With the exception of Amy Brenneman, the feeling was it would be really good to have actors who aren’t recognizable beyond the way character actors are, where it’s like, “Oh, that person looks familiar, but I don’t know what from.”
Q: What was working together like for the two of you?
PERROTTA: For a large part of the first season, I felt like I was in this defensive crouch, trying to protect my book.
LINDELOF: My dad died in 2002. He was a great dude who I loved a lot but kept me at an emotional arm’s length, or several arm’s lengths. Getting my dad’s approval of my writing was everything, and I never got it. After he died, I always needed to have somebody like that in my life who is very hard to please. And I cast Tom in that role even though the shoe didn’t fit, because Tom would regularly like my ideas.
Q: What were some of the debates that ensued?
LINDELOF: I think I pitched a swap, and in another reality, 98% of the population disappeared.
PERROTTA: We had a profound philosophical argument that stretched across the making of the entire show. (Laughs.) I said, “There is this one supernatural or unexplained event, which is the Departure.” And Damon very reasonably said, “If the Departure happens, then other destabilizing, or supernatural, or miraculous things can happen.” And you can see the whole show as a kind of argument that, in some large sense, he won. The show got stranger and stranger. I didn’t experience it as a loss; I experienced it as a really wonderful opening up of the story.
LINDELOF: In the first season, I was against any level of humor, because humor would not exist in this space. And I think that was completely and totally the wrong instinct.
Q: “The Leftovers” initially seems to revolve around Kevin Garvey, a police chief played by Justin Theroux. But beginning in the sixth episode, “Guest,” Coon’s character, Nora, becomes at least as important. What did that do for the series?
LINDELOF: That’s always been my approach to storytelling: You think this person is a supporting character in your story, but you’re a supporting character in theirs.
PERROTTA: You can’t talk about that show without talking about the remarkable reappearance of Holy Wayne. Nora’s scene with him feels absurd, and then it ends with this emotional catharsis. Holy Wayne might well be a huckster and a charlatan, and yet what he offers Nora is real. We see it. That, to me, is one of the most extraordinary moments in the show.
LINDELOF: I think we were a little gun-shy about how to use Nora but not make it mourning porn. There were so many conversations and so much trial and error, and then it all clarified when we were breaking “Guest,” and when Carrie performed it. Carl Franklin directed the episode, and he actually called from the set and was like, “Where did you find this person?”
Q: Between Seasons 1 and 2, the main setting moved from upstate New York to Texas. How did the show change?
PERROTTA: Season 2 I felt like I was another writer in the room, and we were all creating this thing together. And it was just easier psychologically for me.
LINDELOF: I was like, let’s do a thing that shows like “The Wire” did, which is completely and totally change the location and the main cast of the show. What if we did almost a new pilot for the second season, and Kevin and Nora don’t even show up until the last 10 minutes?
PERROTTA: By the time we were writing “International Assassin” (a surreal, allegorical and acclaimed episode, the eighth of Season 2), I think we all knew that it was firing on all cylinders. All we had to go on was our growing confidence about what “The Leftovers” was. That became a regular chorus in the room: “This feels like ‘The Leftovers.’”
LINDELOF: I know this sounds borderline religious and cosmic, but the show develops a consciousness of its own. And it will reject bad ideas that are outside the framework of what the show wants to be.
Q: In the series finale, Nora encounters Kevin again after a long time apart and tells him of a journey to reunite with her lost family. How do you understand her perspective there?
PERROTTA: Nora is offering, in effect, a religious narrative. And Kevin is responding with a narrative of unconditional love. It’s such a simple human declaration, and that is the scale that the show wants to live on. It can live on the scale of Nora saying, “There’s a particle physicist who created the machine that sent me to this other dimension.” But the show really exists on somebody saying, “If that’s what you need to believe to be in my life, I’ll believe it with you.”
Q: “The Leftovers” ended in 2017, a few years before the pandemic. That was a real-life mass trauma event, with millions of people experiencing devastating loss. Do you see the show as a potential receptacle for any of those feelings?
PERROTTA: If you think about the 20th century, the Holocaust happens, and it’s horror beyond imagining. But just a few years later, the world is dancing to Elvis. The weird part is not how much we suffer — because we do — but how quickly we forget it, or live with it. I think there’s something about the scale of “The Leftovers” that’s truer to the cataclysms that we lived through.
LINDELOF: The one inevitability of all of our lives is that we’re going to lose someone that we care about deeply. And there’s just not enough art out there that says, “This is going to happen to you. And when it does, you can come here and not feel like a crazy person.” It’s amazing to me how hard it is to make a list of the things in pop culture that deal with grief. It tracks, because that’s not exactly going to get people in the tents: “Hey, you want to see a show about the worst feeling you’ll ever feel, and can’t avoid?”
PERROTTA: When the pandemic happened, I definitely spoke to people who felt like “The Leftovers” had … “predicted” isn’t the right word, but that it had described something similar.
Q: How does it feel to hear from fans who tell you about what “The Leftovers” meant in their lives?
LINDELOF: It was always my dream to make a cult show that most people hadn’t heard of, but was somebody’s favorite show. “The Leftovers” is actually incapable of crossing over into what we call the mainstream, because it wasn’t designed for that.
PERROTTA: I can be giving a reading about Tracy Flick (the protagonist of his novels “Election” and “Tracy Flick Can’t Win”), but there will be “Leftovers” fans in the audience. I think they feel like they’re part of a select group, because the show never was popular on the grand scale.
LINDELOF: The thing that I love most about it is they talk to me like someone who also watched the show. They don’t talk to me like someone who made the show.
This article originally appeared in
The New York Times.
