Interview (Written): Damon Lindelof (“The Leftovers”)
I thought the HBO series “The Leftovers” was one of the most compelling, even fascinating series last year, so I’m excited to see what’s in store in Season 2.
In advance of the season premiere this Sunday, The Hollywood Reporter sat down with showrunner Damon Lindelof for an interview:
What did the initial conversations between you and Perrotta about season two look like?
In season one, we obviously had the template of Tom’s book and we always knew that the last scene of the book — in fact, the last four words of the book — were going to be exact same last four words of the season finale. We always knew that. But because we’re doing a television show, I think undercutting that is always the anxiety of, “But then what? What’s next?” And The Leftovers just didn’t feel like a show that was going to live and die on cliffhangers. There are plenty of amazing television shows that end their seasons in really satisfying ways, like Mad Men and The Wire, even The Sopranos. The question just becomes, “Do you want to spend more time with these people?” versus, “Is this person who’s just been shot going to live?” There also are shows that I love, like Breaking Bad, where the seasons ended — and certainly moreso as they moved into their endgame — with a more dynamic, “What’s going to happen next?” The Leftovers is never going to be that show.
What then did you have in mind for the second season at that point?
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?”
There were a couple of ideas that we had over the course of the first season of the show, one of which was, “What if there was a town somewhere in the United States where nobody departed, and what would that place be like?” The show felt like it wanted to move somewhere. In that amazing letter to Kevin [at the end of last season], Nora writes, “I need to leave this place. I’m still living in the same house and sitting at the same kitchen table where I suffered this great tragedy. Why?”
Tom wrote the book as kind of a 9/11 parable, or at least that got attributed to it, and now here we are many, many years after 9/11 but there are still the 9/11 widows and widowers who have made that their life. So we were really interested in this idea of breaking free of the grief cycle. I wanted to watch a show about people who were trying to feel better, versus people who are stuck in this washer cycle of mystery. So we started getting excited about some of those ideas and went to HBO and said, “Would you be interested in watching this show?”
Just in case you thought the life of a Hollywood writer is all peaches and cream, there’s also this observation from Lindelof:
“I spend my life in a constant state of anxiety and concern,” says Lindelof, who — to no one’s surprise — has been candid about the challenges of the writing process. “To think that I’m swaggering around feeling like I’m just dropping my brilliant creative ideas on the world, and that if they don’t get it then they’re fools, that’s just not the way that I am wired.”
For the rest of the interview, go here.
Anybody else excited about Season 2 of “The Leftovers”?