The Leftovers is the Greatest Television Show of All-Time

After watching HBO’s The Leftovers for the second time, I came to the same conclusion. The three-season drama is the greatest television show of all-time.

Yes, that means better than The Wire, the consensus Greatest Of All Time. It means better than Breaking Bad, The Sopranos, Seinfeld, Friends, and better than Game of Thrones projects to be when it concludes in a few months.

The Leftovers story written by Damon Lindelof and Tom Perrotta is the most well-thought-out, complex, detailed story presented on either television or film yet. Lindelof, who is known for the hit series Lost, put together a three-season long journey where you truly knew nothing until, all of a sudden, you knew everything.

The Leftovers centers around a bizarre, shocking sudden departure event where two percent of the world’s population suddenly disappeared, and others had to deal with a cult as living reminders of the tragedy. The Leftovers is sad, comforting, disastrous, happy, real, devastating, and most importantly, whatever you think it was meant to be. There are few explanations, but instead many reasons to believe what you want or need to believe.

More Articles About TV Shows:

The storytelling leaves it up to the viewer to tell the story in their own mind. How one answers the following key questions is going to drastically differ for viewers: Why was Kevin the one who kept coming back to life? Did Nora really go to the other place? Was Lori trying to kill herself scuba diving? Was the deer Kevin? Did individual people cause the departure?

The Leftovers‘ level of suspense surpassed the ultimate binge-watching experience Breaking Bad early in the second season when Kevin began talking to Patti Levin, who had already died on the show. From that point on, it was a ticking time bomb where it felt like the world that some characters believed was already over was going to actually be over. But there was always a glimpse of hope that Kevin was special – a la the book – and things could actually end with answers and comfort.

The suspense, storytelling, and acting are attached to how real the show turns out to be. Most television critics conclude The Wire is a cinematic achievement in part because of how real it felt, but The Leftovers eclipsed that too. Just as Kevin told his ex-wife (the last time we saw them together) that the surreal world that he kept going back to felt so real, so did this entire show. While so many things happened that are closer to a fantasy than a reality, the show was actually representing emotional coping mechanisms so many are forced to turn to in the real world. Anyone who has ever felt demoralized or seen someone who has felt it would quickly relate to at least one character in the show.

Led by Justin Theroux, the featured cast made you feel what their characters were so unwillingly feeling without saying a single word, as seen on Kevin’s face here:

As for the seasons, the final two seasons top the most universally acclaimed seasons in television history: Game of Thrones’ sixth season, The Wire’s third and fourth seasons, Breaking Bad‘s final one, and True Detective’s epic thriller of a first season.

In the series finale, Lindelof did more than enough to right the wrong of what he didn’t do with Lost. In the final scene of the show, it capped off everything we needed it to be. We witnessed Nora telling the story of the impossible, going to the other side and finally seeing her children again, only to realize while she was unlucky on that side, they were the lucky ones in a different reality where 98 percent of the world vanished. It simultaneously showed Kevin, finally, for the first time being happy, similar to Charles Foster Kane upon finding Rosebud.

Unless, of course, you did not take any of this that way.

Whether you did or not, Kevin and Nora meeting again in the final scene–against all odds, now much older–is a satisfying  conclusion to whatever story you believe was being told: