The sad little tragic parade that is The Leftovers

I am watching The Leftovers - only just now finishing the first season. Most episodes are ensemble pieces, but a few episodes focus on a single character. Sometimes this works to lend gravitas to a later event, their arc contained and resolved within a single episode. For others, it establishes them as the main character in their own story, and over the course of several episodes - thrillingly - these same characters and their stories begin to overlap and become irrevocably tangled. Some episodes - I say this in reverence - could best be described as “tragic drunk man at bar explaining what Radiohead songs are really about”; while others are “let’s all laugh at the tragic drunk man at the bar explaining what Radiohead songs are really about”. It’s grim sometimes, but choral too, and that’s part of the appeal.

How should I best explain?

There is a plot - splinter events related to an overarching mystery in turn related to a mass supernatural event - and the story begins by joining the survivors - the leftovers - three years later, in the aftermath. The Leftovers isn’t obsessed with the mystery of that event - more the nature of it and the meaning behind it. The details of the mystery are vague; it doesn’t deal with it in an expository way - the way shows like Lost have done so successfully. Knowing how character-driven the show is, it’s comforting to realise quickly that every single person in the show is (most of the time) an absolute disaster of a human being, and surely doomed. The pressure is not on the viewer to work out how or why this sad little parade ends but rather what it might mean when it does; all we are left to do is watch their bad decisions and abnormal lives taking place in emotional real time, evolving unpredictably and irrationally, and - all the while - tragically recognisable.