The perplexing HBO series “The Leftovers” takes another severe turn when it returns this fall, when its central family suddenly picks up and moves to a tiny town of Texas that had been spared by the departure that had disappeared so many worldwide.
It may all be because of lower production costs in Austin than in upstate New York settings of the first season. But it’s all a part of the plan, according to Damon Lindelof.
“When we started talking about them just sitting around a table and saying like, ‘What if we left this place?’ the ideas basically started flowing,” he told a panel on HBO day at the TV Critics Association summer press tour. “It opened up the show creatively in really, really interesting ways and, obviously, created the opportunity to introduce some new characters that we’re tremendously excited about.”
This takes the story by novelist Tom Perrotta, pictured second from left, into some new areas. As Perrotta, an executive producer on the AMC series, put it: “It’s actually a pretty exciting thing for me to just see where this story goes.”
That’s an odd thing for a novelist to say about his tale. But, he added, “you have to surrender control.
“I don’t think it’s my story anymore. My novel, every word of that is mine. And I think that, you know, I decided to bring a story into this medium where it becomes a very collaborative venture, and if you collaborate with the right people, it’s a very exciting venture.”
It may be odd, but no more odd than a series where some of the most brutally killed members of the white robed cult from last year may well return in some form.
“Sometimes I feel like I’m a passenger in the car, and sometimes I get to drive,” Perrotta said. “But we’re going to new places. And to me it’s been an experiment in storytelling and I think a really cool one.”
The new season, he says, is “going to do is remove them from the context that they were stuck in last year.”
So the sheriff, for example, has “got a chance to reinvent himself, but he’s also got some residual burdens that he’s got to carry.
“I think we can look at all of our familiar characters and say they have new opportunities and they have old burdens,” Perrotta says. :But they’re really trying to start a new family, and that’s the big difference, I think, from season one to season two. Season one was about how a family fell apart. And season two is about how a family tries to come back together.”