The Television Issue

Here, stories are not fiction: they’re creative, forging the sense of the world.

Stories are ways of knowing the world. The world lost 2% of its people; and those 2% lost 98%. The Sudden Departure happened 14 October here; and on 15 October in Australia. Same events, different perspectives, different worlds, different ways of relating to each other, all happening at once. The genius of The Leftovers comes from the way it’s structured as a sequence of successive series finales. Characters find a way toward closure, then fall away from the story as those who continue to struggle with their powerlessness attempt to find meaning The show is uniquely optimistic because it stared into uncertainty, into darkness, and insisted that we would figure out how to make our own light if we found ourselves stranded. The final two images of the series are two characters holding hands and then doves returning to their roost—which if you know your Noah’s Ark is a sign that the end of the world is beginning to end.

The series doesn’t focus on bringing its plot to a conclusion; instead, it concentrates on guiding its characters toward relief, if not happiness.

They might remain empty, but they are allowed a moment of kindness or gratitude, a moment that pushes them to extend the same to others. If life is meaningless, if nothing has a purpose, then all we have is what we can give to each other. I can’t think of many messages more optimistic than that.

We are living in a time that feels, to almost all of us, like more of an ending than a beginning. We have made it to the future, and it’s trying to kill us. But it’s always the future, and life is always trying to kill us. The world is always ending, but it’s also always beginning.

Struggling against the meaningless nature of life is important, but so is remembering that meaning is what we make of it and that we can create meaning for each other. The Leftovers worked so well because it focused not on the flood, but on the Ark, on the people left aboard, watching the skies for a sign of something new. There’s all this water, all around us—but look at us, we have a boat!