‘The Leftovers’: Damon Lindelof offers up new details of HBO series
It has been a cold, lonely few months for most fans of Damon Lindelof. Once a Twitter icon for his irreverent humor, live updates on “Sharknado,” and feuds with cat food companies, he has since gone underground in the wake of frequent bashing that he received after the “Breaking Bad” finale … mostly because most people cannot let go of their own emotions regarding the end of “Lost.”
We will start this message out first and foremost with what is a very important admission: We actually did enjoy the ending of “Lost,” and so that probably separates us from some people out there. Also, we still feel like Damon is TV’s best mad scientist, and his new series “The Leftovers” for HBO will be awesome. He has been hard at work on it as of late following its series pickup, and in a new interview with Entertainment Weekly, he explains a little bit about what the premise for the show is, and how some of the characters could theoretically react to what is a life-altering event:
“You’ve got this big, crazy, supernatural — potentially spiritual — idea that informs every episode of the show that we’ll ever make, which is that this thing happened, this sudden departure of 140 million people which depending on what side of it you’re on, could be the Rapture. There could be some yet-as-undetermined scientific explanation for it, but still it’s miraculous. The traditional way of telling this story is you’re in immediate aftermath of this event. It’s all that anyone can talk about. Dropping into these people’s lives three years later and saying ‘This is the moment in which they get back to their lives as they were or they decide that they can’t get back to their lives as they were,’ that’s a much more interesting idea. So all decisions that the characters are making is informed by a supernatural idea, but the show is not presenting ongoing supernatural phenomena. You’re not looking at the sky seeing dragons like you are in Game of Thrones. Mulder and Scully are are not showing up and knocking on doors. But this idea of the elephant in the room of the Departure informs everything that’s happening on this show, and I felt that that was a fairly unique thing that I hadn’t really seen before on TV.”
Since everyone is still in some way sad about it, Damon also opened up briefly about his exit from Twitter:
“I will always love her, but Twitter and I were just too much alike to sustain a long-term relationship. As such, we both decided it was time for us to see other people.”
We imagine that Damon’s days in social media are far from over still. While you may not see him back on Twitter, we could very much see there being a Reddit AMA happening at some point in the future to promote either this new show or “Tomorrowland,” the mysterious project that he is working on with Brad Bird.
We’re going to have more on this show as the news comes out, so be on the lookout!