By Recommended Re-Viewing is a series in which we make the case for re-watching an old film or TV series which you can stream without leaving your house. It might be a plot that's so bad it's good, a scene which deserves more interrogation or a director's underrated gem.
Here, Esquire senior writer Olivia Ovenden suggests 'The Leftovers', a 2014 series which looks at how humanity rebuilds after a crisis.
After a long pause, restaurants, offices and churches are slowly creaking their doors open to a different world after the coronavirus lockdowns in different countries start to slowly ease up. It feels extravagant to venture into a trainer shop or queue for a latte when only a few weeks ago many of us feared that going to the supermarket to buy a loaf of bread could kill us.
2014 series The Leftovers explores a similarly strange period of readjustment, after a dark event – dubbed 'The Sudden Departure' – sees two per cent of the earth's population vanish one day without a trace. There is no pattern to the people who are taken; young and old, celebrities and bartenders, thieves and the Pope.
The story is concerned with how the remainder of the population try to acclimatise to the new normal and reckon with loss in this strange new world. Some people turn to religion as a strange cult forms in the wake of the Sudden Departure, others to existential crises or their sexual kinks to process the world they now live in.
It is a story about the struggles of carrying on with the everyday when living in the shadow of something apocalyptic has scorched the earth outside your doorstep, and bar a few plot details, it feels like it could have been written for these unsettling times.
Justin Theroux leads as a policeman in Mapleton, New York, a fictional town which has been blighted by disappearances. The script comes from Lost writer Damon Lindelof, who worked alongside author Tom Perrotta (Little Children) to adapt his eerie novel of the same name into three seasons, which tell the stories of those left behind.
Unlike a lot of pandemic and dystopian fiction, which focuses on otherworldly horrors besieging earth, The Leftovers mostly keeps its feet planted on solid ground, with affecting stories about loss which make for a very human portrayal of grief.
It powerfully conveys that there is no map to follow after experiencing trauma and no easy way to understand why some people survive and some are left behind. The sudden, inexplicable vanishing of 140 million people might sound like a far-fetched idea to empathise with, but a few months ago a pandemic which seems to have originated from bats grinding the world to a halt would have sounded just as much like fiction.
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