THE LEFTOVERS: The 2% of good posters have vanished. Here is what remains.

The Something Awful Forums > The Finer Arts > TV IV > THE LEFTOVERS: The 2% of good posters have vanished. Here is what remains.

DivisionPost: Jun 28, 2006; Nobody likes you.
Everybody hates you.
You're gonna lose.

Smile, you fuck.

The Leftovers comes to us from Damon Lindelof (LOST), Tom Perrotta (author of Little Children, Election, and the book this is based on), and Peter Berg (Friday Night Lights). It picks up three years after a Rapture-like event known as "The Sudden Departure," wherein 2% of the world's population disappeared without warning or fanfare. There's no rhyme or reason to who left: Christians, Jews, Muslims, members of the Ba'lal Faith. Men, women, children. Saints, sinners -- it's like whoever or whatever took them just threw darts at the Earth while blindfolded and took whoever got caught.

The series picks up three years after The Departure. The world is still functioning. But science and the conventional organized religions have thrown their hands up in defeat, and a sense of nihilism has gripped the planet. The story zeroes in on the New York suburb of Mapleton, as its remaining inhabitants try to deal with the fact that they don't know what the gently caress happened.

Reviews for four of the first five episodes have been, uh, positive. Let's get Our Lord And Savior, Patron Saint of TV Criticism Alan Sepinwall out of the way first:

Alan Sepinwall posted:

What divine madness could have possibly compelled Damon Lindelof to involve himself with "The Leftovers"?

Why would the co-creator and longtime showrunner of "Lost," who endured so much public abuse from some corners because of that series' finale, decide that his next TV project would be a complicated story marked by despair, spirituality and a complete lack of answers to a sweeping cosmic mystery � in other words, three of the things "Lost" fans tended to hate the most?...Maybe it's masochism. Lindelof finally quit Twitter last fall (appropriately, on the date of the show's mysterious Departure), after spending three years flagellating himself in response to the tweets of "Lost" finale haters, and perhaps he needed another source of pain and discomfort....Or maybe he was drawn to "The Leftovers" � a show that in many ways feels even more deserving of the title "Lost" than that one about the island filled with polar bears, pirate ships and ranch dressing � because he saw in Pertotta's book the chance to do something truly special...Maybe he saw the opportunity in "The Leftovers" to make something great. Because he sure as hell has.

Okay, strong words, but how do we assure the people who think Sepinwall is overrated and too easy to please? Strap on your skates, Todd, you're going in!

Todd VanDerWerff posted:

Based on the novel by Tom Perrotta (who shares a co-creator credit with Lindelof and co-writes a couple of episodes), The Leftovers is some of the most desolate, despairing television on air. It�s also frequently brilliant, using the central hook of Perrotta�s book not as a pivot into genre fiction but as a pivot into something like a modern version of medieval mystery plays. But instead of God at the center of the story, there�s uncertainty, a Schr�dinger�s cat the characters would desperately like to observe, if only they could force the box to open and provide them with answers.

[...]

The Leftovers is still young enough to have some growing pains...the show can occasionally seem too in love with being grim just for being grim...But on the whole, it�s elegiac, ingenious television, unlike anything else on the air. It has elements of mystery, like Lost, and it has elements of satire, like Perrotta�s novels, but it�s also its own thing, a weird art film and character piece that also features large packs of feral dogs running wild. It�s a show where the flashbacks�another Lost standby�only come in tiny, seconds-long spurts of pain, because the past may be somewhere characters long to return to, but it�s also a completely different country, a before only made real by the shadow it casts on the wall.

Looking good, looking real good. James Poniewozik, anything to add?

James Poniewozik posted:

The first two episodes feel unsettled, aimless and seasick -- Peter Berg�s trademark jumpy-cam direction contributes to that -- jumping around its ensemble to paint a vast mural of sadness...There are striking moments: a flock of balloon doves being released in tribute, Kevin coming upon a pack of pet dogs gone feral (a possible sign of where human society is heading)...But it all seems a bit logy and unreal, as if, like the Remnant with their white garb and silence, The Leftovers made its suffering too generic and surrendered its voice.

Then comes the fantastic third episode, which follows Mapleton pastor Matt Jamison (Christopher Eccleston) through a crisis of faith, all through a story as neatly and twistily crafted as a Twilight Zone episode. The fifth (episode four was not ready at press time) pulls back a bit to go inside the Remnant�led by a quietly riveting Ann Dowd�and examine the reverberations of a brutal crime through Mapleton. And suddenly The Leftovers� blur distills into focus. The show does have a distinct voice, once you learn to hear it, at once ethereal and hyperrealistic, a combination echoed in the show�s visual language, in which even hallucination sequences are shot in harsh handheld video. It�s one of the truest TV evocations I can recall of the waking-dream feel of actual mourning.

Interesting. Maybe to close this out we should hear from somebody who's a little more trepidatious. Josef Adalian, what say you?

quote:

Throughout the first few episodes, fleeting shots communicate the magnitude of the shock with which the species is still grappling. Some are quietly effective...Others feel as though Lindelof, Perrotta, and co-producer Peter Berg (Friday Night Lights), who has helmed the first two episodes in his now-familiar bobbing-and-weaving camera style (the show�s action is covered rather than being thoughtfully directed) are forcing moments that might have been more devastating if handled lightly...

Such scenes might have worked had The Leftovers embraced the black-comedy elements that sometimes bubble up (a TV newscast airs a list of missing celebrities that includes Gary Busey and Shaquille O�Neal), or if it had given up on serious philosophical statements and instead exploited the pulp potential suggested by Paterson Joseph�s ferociously hammy performance as Holy Wayne...Though I haven�t read Perrotta�s novel, I�m told there�s a point to all the misery, perhaps even a hint of hope...If that�s where we�re headed, though, it�s going to be a long, dark road, and I�m concerned there won�t be enough compensatory aesthetic virtues to offset the agony...But I�d be lying if I said The Leftovers didn�t fascinate me. The totality of the suffering feels new. The scale of it overwhelms, so much so that nitpicking the dialogue, the performances, or the filmmaking seems petty.

The consensus seems to be "This show is bleak and horrible and many people will not want to hang with it, but it's a hell of a show and demands a few episodes of your attention." Okay, I'm game.

As stated in the thread title, The Leftovers premieres this Sunday, June 29 at 10 PM ET. While you wait, Sepinwall had a chat with Lindelof and Perrotta about the show. The whole thing is worth reading, and there's a particularly good bit about how they're approaching the overriding mythology of the show. Short answer, as stated by Lindelof himelf: "If you were frustrated [with LOST], don't watch The Leftovers."

DivisionPost fucked around with this message at 16:23 on Jun 26, 2014

# ¿ Jun 26, 2014 16:16

Adbot: ADBOT LOVES YOU

# ¿ May 15, 2024 15:49

DivisionPost: Jun 28, 2006; Nobody likes you.
Everybody hates you.
You're gonna lose.

Smile, you fuck.

Oh my God ALREADY IT'S HAPPENING

# ¿ Jun 27, 2014 20:49

DivisionPost: Jun 28, 2006; Nobody likes you.
Everybody hates you.
You're gonna lose.

Smile, you fuck.

There's our FNL cameo!

# ¿ Jun 30, 2014 03:09

DivisionPost: Jun 28, 2006; Nobody likes you.
Everybody hates you.
You're gonna lose.

Smile, you fuck.

Slackerish posted:

the premiere only had 1.77 million views, I wonder if this will gain any more momentum or if it'll only last one season.

HBO gives very few fucks about the number of live viewers any one show gets, and those fucks decrease as critical acclaim goes up.

# ¿ Jul 2, 2014 06:27

DivisionPost: Jun 28, 2006; Nobody likes you.
Everybody hates you.
You're gonna lose.

Smile, you fuck.

Tomahawk posted:

Here he states the question is deliberately ambiguous because he doesn't want viewers to focus on waiting for answers:

quote:

"If you were frustrated [with LOST], don't watch The Leftovers."

Seems definitive in its own way.

# ¿ Jul 3, 2014 16:29

The Something Awful Forums > The Finer Arts > TV IV > THE LEFTOVERS: The 2% of good posters have vanished. Here is what remains.