‘The Leftovers’ season 2 almost didn’t happen; why did it?
With the premiere of “The Leftovers” coming on HBO Sunday night, there is a tremendous amount of expectation for the story to be fantastic. This is what happens when you are pairing up the network with Damon Lindelof, and then having a fantastic stable of actors joining them.
For the first season, we do feel like the show set out what they wanted to do: Present a cycle of misery for people impacted by a shocking Departure that took away a percentage of the human population. It was a bold move, and one that definitely was not met with universal acclaim. Some felt that it was a little too depressing, and we admit there were times where we had to take a step away from the show to take a deep breath. Yet, we continued to watch anyone.
We cannot convince you that the story is going to get better for these people in the second season, with the main reason for that being that it is not clear that it will be. However, we know that it will be at least different thanks to a new setting (Miracle, Texas), new characters (the Murphy family), and then also a storyline that at least could have some hopeful notes to it.
In speaking on this subject further to The Hollywood Reporter, Lindelof mentioned that there was a time when he and co-showrunner Tom Perrotta (who wrote the book on which season 1 was an adaptation of) debated whether there was any story left:
“When the first season ended, I was certainly of the mind of, ‘Well, maybe we’re done. Maybe this is all there is. We just did a season, ten episodes, of this thing. Is there a compelling reason to continue? What are the story threads that we’d want to explore?’ Then we sat down and we started saying, ‘What does this family look like? What is Garvey 2.0? What does ‘Kevin and Nora’ look like? It seems like Laurie is out of the Guilty Remnant and she’s with Tom but both of them kind of joined these crazy cults, so what would they do next — and is that interesting?’ So we basically had the freedom to explore the idea of, ‘We don’t have to do this if we don’t want to, but if we wanted to, what would it be?'”
If you do want to read some other preview news right away for “The Leftovers,” including some of what Carrie Coon had to say about the story coming up, head over to the link here! Also, you can sign up here to score some other TV news on everything we cover, sent right over to you via our CarterMatt Newsletter. (Photo: HBO.)