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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   2606 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for August 25, 2023

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Somebody here recommended The Leftovers to me, a show on HBO Max. It's pretty incredible. Not sure why, but it's a very fascinating look into belief and miracles and how they interact with the modern world.

I enjoyed The Leftovers but also find it to be a bit overrated. Perhaps my view is in part influenced by the foreknowledge that this was a show from Damon Lindelof, writer of Lost, and seeing people claim that the show "fixed the problems present in Lost" and was Lindelof redeeming himself with a well-handled mystery.

Except it wasn't at all. Where Lost struggled mightily to give answers to every little crazy incident, often to no benefit, the approach of The Leftovers was just to abandon the majority of mysteries every season and never mention them again. This meant it avoided lots of trite explanations or dumb exposition, but I wouldn't call it resolving the problems that Lost had by any means.

I suppose the answer to Leftovers' strong reception is in the idea that "it's really about the characters". After the Lost finale, this line was trotted out a lot to defend the show, that it didn't matter that the mystery box was unsatisfying because actually you just wanted to see what happened to the characters. To an extent you did care about the endings for the characters in Lost, but really it was much more about the mystery box. With the Leftovers, you could actually claim that it was really about the characters, and being an HBO show with a fine cast and big budget, its character stuff was really strong.

Nonetheless, I was disappointed to go in expecting a satisfying mystery box and not getting that. (I'm also expecting the exact same thing to happen with new mystery box show Severance)

Except it wasn't at all. Where Lost struggled mightily to give answers to every little crazy incident, often to no benefit, the approach of The Leftovers was just to abandon the majority of mysteries every season and never mention them again.

To me, the abandoning of mysteries was the point, and a large part of what made the show so impressive and deeply meaningful. Most mysteries in life aren't resolved. Normally in fiction it's annoying when they don't get resolved, but the genius of the Leftovers was their ability to relate these mysteries and the accompanying grief and suffering so well to normal life that it stuck.

I think that this works for some aspects of the show but not all of them. The Guilty remnant, for example. didn't need an explanation - you can just assume that they were a weirdo cult capitalizing on a tragedy like plenty of other weirdo cults. But IIRC there were a number of other bizarre occurrences and red herrings thrown out that couldn't just be handwaved away and seemed like audience hooks that never got resolved.

Funny, I remember trying to watch that and just noping out super hard maybe 3 or 4 episodes in? Just couldn't do it. I think it was how heavy the emphasis was on cults breaking up families which squicked me out. Just hit a bit too close to home in ways I perhaps wasn't fully conscious of in the escalating culture war.

First season is the weakest although I still love it. The most common criticism of the show is how hardcore its tone is, but in the second half of the first season it finds a much more harmonious emotional tenor. It’s still very intense.

The second and third seasons are basically flawless as far as I’m concerned. And it ends at the right time, it’s only three seasons long and each season is very distinct.

It was probably me, it continues to be my favorite TV series of all time.

Its exploration of belief and non-belief and the social dynamics they engender, of myth-making, of grief and hopelessness captivated me.

I’m a universal darwinist, a materialist atheist but this work of art produced something very similar to a crisis of faith in me and changed the way I feel about my relationship with Reality because it forced me to contend with Mystery with a capital M.

I’m a better person for engaging with it. More confused, more layered, more fearful, more comfortable being afraid, and more comfortable with ambiguity. I was humbled by the experience.

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