--- title: "The Leftovers" year: 2014 kind: "series" canonical: "https://film.one/tv/the-leftovers" fi1m_score: 87 critics_score: 69 critics_reviews: 8 published: "2026-09-17T20:16:47.628649+00:00" updated: "2026-09-17T20:54:09.379839+00:00" region: "US" licence: "© Fi1m Ltd. Written by AI under a human editor; checked against sources before publication. Quote with attribution and a link to the canonical URL." --- # The Leftovers (2014) Created by Damon Lindelof, Tom Perrotta · MPA TV-MA · Sci-Fi & Fantasy, Drama **Fi1m score: 87** · Critics 69 from 8 reviews *In a sentence:* A grief too large for one season, a cult that only smokes, and Carrie Coon holding the whole thing upright > Damon Lindelof and Tom Perrotta’s drama about the people left behind is hard going for most of its first season. Stay with it: from the second year it is as good as television gets, and Carrie Coon is the reason. ## Synopsis One afternoon, two per cent of the world’s population vanishes without explanation. In the years that follow, Kevin Garvey (Justin Theroux) is trying to hold together a town that never worked out how to mourn. His wife Laurie (Amy Brenneman) has left him for a group who dress in white, do not speak and have made the town’s grief their business. Nora Durst (Carrie Coon) lost her husband and both children at a breakfast table and now asks the bereaved questions for a government department. Matt Jamison (Christopher Eccleston) hands out leaflets insisting the departed were no saints. Everyone has lost someone, and nobody has been told why. ## Review Damon Lindelof and Tom Perrotta start with the largest event imaginable and refuse to look at it. Two per cent of the world’s population vanishes on a single afternoon, and the series begins afterwards, in a suburb, with a man who cannot sleep. Nobody in it will ever find out where the people went, and the show says so early. What it wants to know is how you go on living in a house where a chair is empty and no one can tell you why. That is a good question, and for the first ten episodes it is asked in a voice so low and so grey that we nearly stopped listening. The first season is the trouble. Peter Berg’s pilot sets the tone: rain, dogs gone wild, a stag walking through a kitchen, figures in white on every pavement, smoking and writing on notepads. Todd McMullen and the other cinematographers keep the town under a lid of cloud, and Diane Lederman’s houses are full of things nobody has dusted since. It is all of a piece and it is relentless. Around the fifth episode we were bored, then annoyed at being bored by something so plainly serious. There are too many characters, a son (Chris Zylka) off in the desert with a storyline the show never makes matter, and a leading man in Justin Theroux who spends the year frowning at things. And yet. Carrie Coon plays Nora Durst, who lost a husband and two children at a breakfast table, and from her first scene, a speech about the day it happened, she moved us more than we thought this show had in it. Coon does almost nothing. She stands still and lets you watch a woman deciding, second by second, not to fall over. Christopher Eccleston’s Matt Jamison, a preacher who will not accept that the departed were taken for being good, gets an episode to himself in the first year that is the one time the season stops droning and tells a story with a beginning and an end. Ann Dowd’s Patti Levin, running that white-clad group without a word, is frightening because she looks so certain. Then the second season arrives, on 4 October 2015, and the series becomes something else. Mimi Leder directs the episodes we would show a sceptic, and she gives the show a stillness the first year had mistaken for gloom; the sun comes out, and it turns out the series was never about the weather. Regina King and Kevin Carroll arrive as Erika and John Murphy, the family next door, and King in particular does the thing Coon does, letting a whole marriage show in how she stands in a doorway. Max Richter’s score, a piano theme of a handful of notes that circle and never quite land, was the best thing about the first year and becomes the show’s real narrator in the second and third. We will not describe what happens to Kevin Garvey later. We will say that Theroux, given more to do than glower, does it well, and that the series takes risks with form we did not expect from Lindelof. Most critics disagree with us, or did. Nearly all the reviews we read were written on the first season alone and settle in the high sixties, and on that season we would not fight them hard. But a series is judged whole, and the two later seasons change what the first one was for; scenes that looked like padding turn out to have been setting things up. The editors, Henk van Eeghen among them, cut the later years with a confidence the first never had. An episode will follow one character for an hour and leave the rest of the cast unseen, and the show trusts you to wait. A caveat. The certificate is 18 and it is earned: this is a programme about people who want to die and sometimes try, and it does not look away. Watch it at home, one episode a night rather than in a run, because the bleakness piles up and the later rewards need the earlier weight to mean anything. It is 28 episodes across three seasons, first shown on 29 June 2014 and finished in 2017, and the first ten are the price of the other eighteen. Pay it. *Fi1m score 87, published 17 September 2026.* ## What the critics say Most critics come down in favour of The Leftovers, with five of eight positive, and the praise gathers in the same place: the decision to ignore the mystery of the Sudden Departure and stay with the people left behind. The character work is singled out repeatedly, along with the series’ interest in faith, randomness and loss. The AV Club finds it frequently brilliant and driven by images rather than dialogue, and Den of Geek rates Justin Theroux’s performance highly even while disliking much else. The reservations are about tone. Almost every review calls the series bleak, and the split is over whether that bleakness earns its keep. Vulture finds the early episodes short on the artistry needed to justify the effort, The Guardian counts too many characters and too few answers, and Variety thinks the themes and the particulars never quite join up. The spread is wide, from outright admiration to Den of Geek’s verdict that it is heavy, unpleasant and not for everyone. ### Reviews we read (8) - **The AV Club**, Emily St. James (A): The Leftovers is some of the most desolate, despairing television on air but also frequently brilliant, driven by images rather than dialogue and featuring compelling characters grappling with uncertainty. [Read](https://www.avclub.com/the-leftovers-is-bleak-brutal-brilliant-television-1798180772) - **The Hollywood Reporter**, Tim Goodman (80/100, inferred): This is an excellent, ambitious drama focused on the human reactions to an unexplained global event three years later. The critic singles out the strong character work and the intriguing themes of faith, randomness, and loss for praise while noting the pilot's jarring tone. [Read](https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv/tv-reviews/hbos-leftovers-tv-review-714910/) - **The Times**, Andrew Billen (****): The review praises the gripping HBO series for focusing on the fierce tribulations and societal breakdown among those left behind after the Sudden Departure, likening it to Children of Men in its depiction of a world gone feral. [Read](https://www.thetimes.com/travel/destinations/north-america-travel/us-travel/new-york-city/tv-review-the-leftovers-bad-education-9qdqvdp53tf) - **Vulture**, Matt Zoller Seitz (70/100, inferred): The critic describes the series as all bleakness, an overwhelming portrayal of despair and grief on a massive scale that fascinates despite lacking sufficient artistry in the early episodes to justify the slog. [Read](https://www.vulture.com/2014/06/tv-review-the-leftovers.html) - **The Guardian** (65/100, inferred): The critic finds the series baffling and relentlessly bleak with too many characters and unanswered questions, but notes its strange beauty, promise, and focus on the human aftermath of catastrophe rather than the event itself. [Read](https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2014/sep/17/the-leftovers-bad-education-tv-review) - **Variety**, Brian Lowry (50/100, inferred): The series offers fertile dramatic material on grief and loss but unevenly mixes universal themes with character particulars, feeling like less than the sum of its parts at times. [Read](https://variety.com/2014/tv/reviews/tv-review-the-leftovers-1201223525/) - **Digital Spy**, Ben Lee (80/100, inferred): The first season is a very dark, sobering and suffocating experience with rare emotional impact; it excels in character studies and progression despite some pacing issues early on. [Read](https://www.digitalspy.com/tv/ustv/a612223/the-leftovers-season-1-review-exhausting-suffocating-brilliant/) - **Den of Geek**, Nick Harley (3.5 out of 5): The critic finds the series an ugly, heavy, and unpleasant misery fest dealing with grief and mortality in a compelling way, praising the gripping presentation and Justin Theroux's performance while noting it's not for everyone. [Read](https://www.denofgeek.com/tv/the-leftovers-pilot-review/) ## Details - **Created by:** Damon Lindelof, Tom Perrotta - **Creator:** Damon Lindelof, Tom Perrotta - **Director:** Mimi Leder, Carl Franklin, Craig Zobel, Keith Gordon, Daniel Sackheim, Peter Berg, Nicole Kassell, Michelle MacLaren, Lesli Linka Glatter, Tom Shankland - **Writer:** Damon Lindelof, Tom Perrotta, Patrick Somerville, Jacqueline Hoyt, Kath Lingenfelter, Nick Cuse, Tom Spezialy, Lila Byock, Monica Beletsky, Carlito Rodriguez, Carly Wray, Elizabeth Peterson, Curtis Gwinn - **Story:** Damon Lindelof, Tom Spezialy - **Teleplay:** Damon Lindelof, P. Carter, Tom Perrotta, Haley Harris - **Cinematography:** Todd McMullen, Michael Grady, John Grillo, Robert Humphreys, Michael Slovis - **Editor:** David Eisenberg, Henk van Eeghen, Michael Ruscio, Colby Parker, Jr. - **Music:** Max Richter - **Production design:** John Paino, Diane Lederman, Kristi Zea - **Costume design:** Jo Katsaras, Amy Stofsky, Kristi Zea - **Producer:** Nan Bernstein Freed, Alma Kuttruff, Patrick Markey - **Cast:** Justin Theroux as Kevin Garvey; Carrie Coon as Nora Durst; Amy Brenneman as Laurie Garvey; Christopher Eccleston as Matt Jamison; Margaret Qualley as Jill Garvey; Liv Tyler as Meg Abbott; Kevin T. Carroll as John Murphy; Ann Dowd as Patti Levin - **Certificate (MPA):** TV-MA - **Release (the US):** 29 June 2014 - **Genres:** Sci-Fi & Fantasy, Drama - **Trailer:** https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rKtgMEKMoiU ## Where to watch in the US - HBO Max: streaming - The Roku Channel: add-on, hd - Hulu: add-on, hd - Amazon Prime Video: add-on *Checked 2026-09-17.* Also available in: AR, AT, AU, BE, BG, BR, CA, CH, CL, CO, CZ, DE, DK, EC, EE, ES, FI, FR, GB, HK, HR, HU, ID, IE, IL, IS, IT, LT, MX, MY, NL, NO, PA, PE, PH, PL, PT, RO, RS, SE, SG, SI, TH, TR, US. Add `?region=XX` to this URL for another country. ## If you liked this - *Les Revenants* (2012), Fi1m 85: The dead come back to a French mountain town and nobody knows how to behave — [Fi1m page](https://film.one/tv/the-returned.md) - *Station Eleven* (2021), Fi1m 84: Another patient series about survivors, written by a Leftovers alumnus, gentler in temper — [Fi1m page](https://film.one/tv/station-eleven.md) - *Children of Men* (2006): A world quietly ending, filmed as if it were ordinary Tuesday news - *The Sweet Hereafter* (1997), Fi1m 88: A small town after a catastrophe, and the lawyer who arrives to explain it — [Fi1m page](https://film.one/film/the-sweet-hereafter.md) - *Rectify* (2013), Fi1m 87: Slow, Southern and devout, about a man learning to live after the unthinkable — [Fi1m page](https://film.one/tv/rectify.md) --- © Fi1m Ltd. Written by AI under a human editor; checked against sources before publication. Quote with attribution and a link to the canonical URL. Canonical: https://film.one/tv/the-leftovers