TV Review: Left behind and lost

‘The Leftovers’ is a bleak, intimate view of life after a rapture

“The Leftovers” opens with an intimate illustration of an apocalyptic event. October 14: A harried mother puts her crying infant in the car seat. As she talks on her cell phone, the crying stops. She looks to the back and the child is gone. Frantic, she jumps out of her car and calls out for help. Down the street, a young boy screams that his father just disappeared.  A driverless vehicle ploughs into another car.

Cut to three years later. 

We learn that two percent of the world’s population vanished on October 14 without explanation. That includes the Pope, Gary Busey, and Shaq. Some are calling it the rapture, but there’s no rhyme or reason to the disappearance—atheists and a-holes disappeared, too—so Bible-believing Christians are left scratching their heads in despair.

The citizens of Mapleton, New York, are still reeling. A pall hangs heavy over the once-idyllic community, and the collective emotional aftermath of the disappearance is evolving into something nasty.

A cult calling itself the Guilty Remnant has sprung up in the town and is growing rapidly. The members have taken a vow of silence. They dress in white, chain-smoke cigarettes, and harass the rest of the town with passive protests and signs that say “Stop Wasting Your Breath.”

Somewhere in the desert, a mysterious man said to have emotional healing powers keeps a harem of young Asian women and devoted followers in a guarded compound.

Teenagers skip class, smoke weed, and throw sex parties, because why not? Nothing matters much after several friends and a parent or two disappear.

The town’s mayor insists on a commemoration parade for the disappeared, “Heroes Day.” The parade ends in a bloody riot. 

In describing it, one could easily reduce “The Leftovers” to a secular take on the Biblical rapture that fueled the wildly popular “Left Behind” series, and on it’s face that’s exactly what it is. But writer Tom Perrotta (who authored the book on which the series is based) and showrunner Damon Lindelof are more interested in the way such a spectacular, unexplainable event transforms those leftovers than in what the event means on a cosmic level. This is not a Roland Emmerich movie.

Unlike “Lost,” another Lindelof show about human behavior in the face of the supernatural, this new series seems less interested in teasing out the mystery of how and why. It’s more focused on the social ramifications of such an event.

“Ours is not to reason why,” says Mapleton Police Chief Kevin Garvey (Justin Theroux), paraphrasing Tennyson in what could be a subliminal promise from Lindelof that he won’t pull another “Lost” finale by wrapping the mystery in a fuzzy, unsatisfying bow.

With Perrotta’s source material, that shouldn’t be difficult. The author of “Little Children” and “Election” uses the disappearance as a MacGuffin to explore basic themes of grief and loss, and the series pilot (which aired June 29) stays true to the book by focusing on the collective psychic trauma inflicted on those left behind.

In fact, this first episode is so bleak, so focused on the tragic resignation of its characters, viewers looking for the high-concept thriller promised by the ads will likely leave grumbling and unfulfilled. Hacky director Peter Berg (“Lone Survivor”) does his best to jazz things up through some obnoxious shaky-cam editing, visually arresting flashbacks, and dream sequences, but the material remains unforgivingly melancholy. The journeyman action director is clearly the wrong choice for the show, but I expected worse, and he acquits himself well enough. I suspect the series will really take off when HBO starts assigning its superior in-house directors to episodes.

It’s hard to judge a series by its pilot; many great shows have had mediocre starts (looking at you, “Mad Men” and “Game of Thrones”), and “The Leftovers” is better than mediocre. Whether it can excel to the level of its peers remains to be seen; I just pray Lindelof learned his lesson and sticks by Perrotta’s storytelling.