The Left HBOvers

Damon Lindelof is setting his sights on TV again after venturing into big screen endeavors like this summer’s Prometheus along with lending his pen to the upcoming Star Trek 2 and the beleaguered World War Z. Six months after announcing that he was developing an adaptation of author Tom Perrotta's novel The Leftovers, HBO has ordered the drama to pilot, sources confirmed to The Hollywood Reporter. As first reported by Vulture, the former Lost co-creator will co-write the project with Perrotta under his three-year deal with Warner Bros. Television. HBO will produce alongside WBTV. Perrotta also will executive produce with Ron Yerxa and Albert Berger. Should the project move forward from its development status, Lindelof would serve as showrunner.

As long as you overlook Noah Baumbach’s adaptation of Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections, HBO has a history of successfully transforming best-selling novels into hit television shows, and now, with the help of Lindelof, the network is hoping to make the quasi-religious mystery of The Leftovers the next program eating up an hour of your Sunday evening. Perrotta’s novel, which was published in May, concerns a small town dealing with the aftermath of a Rapture-like event known as the Sudden Departure, which saw people from all over the globe vanish in an instant. The main story revolves around the town’s Mayor, Kevin Garvey, and his attempt to help his community – which saw 100 people disappear in the event – as his own family deteriorates around him. Garvey’s wife has taken up with a cult known as the Guilty Remnant and his son is now following a self-proclaimed prophet going by the name Holy Wayne. Only, his daughter remains with Kevin, but the event has left her changed, too.


The basic principle may be similar to the Left Behind series, but here, the idea isn’t leading to an eventual showdown between good and evil. Instead, The Leftovers is concerned with exploring the ramifications, and seemingly unanswerable questions of what the event actually was and how regular people are expected to carry on with their lives. The metaphysical questions posed in the novel are clearly ones familiar to Lindelof, who dealt with similarly large themes in Lost and Prometheus, so it’s easy to understand why he was drawn to the material. In an interview with Vulture, Lindelof delved into the concepts that attracted him to the book that Stephen King has dubbed "the best Twilight Zone episode you never saw," and explains how they relate to his past work...

How The Leftovers Popped Up on His Radar

Lindelof saw King's write-up of the book last August in The New York Times Book Review. "I got about a paragraph into it and immediately Amazon'd the book," he says, noting he had already read Perrotta's Little Children and Election. "And when I got the book, I fell deeply and passionately in love with it. I think that even from the moment I read the logline for the book, it was something I wanted to be vicariously a part of as opposed to just enjoying it as a consumer." Lindelof finished the novel in two days; he then got on the phone to his agents at CAA to find out if anyone had snagged the film or TV rights to the project. "They told me HBO had snapped it up when it was still in galleys," he says. Lindelof asked his agents to keep tabs on the book's development progress at HBO and to let execs at the network know of his interest.

In a bit of kismet, a few months after Lindelof found out The Leftovers was set up at HBO, the cable channel hired producer Michael Ellenberg, with whom Lindelof had become friends after working together on Prometheus. An immediate deal couldn't happen, however, since Lindelof was under contract to ABC Studios, and HBO rarely partners with outside studios on projects. It wasn't until the ABC pact expired and Lindelof signed with HBO's corporate cousin, Warner Bros. TV, that talks could begin on a deal for Lindelof to adapt The Leftovers.

Why He Was Attracted to the Project

The scribe points to two major themes in the book that caught his interest. The first was that it takes place in a world where it's now impossible to deny the existence of some sort of miraculous power. With 200 million people suddenly gone, and without explanation, "You can't be an atheist anymore," he says. "It takes us back in time to a place in human history where everyone's lives were dictated by the gods of Olympus or the gods of the heavens. [The book] tries to explain the purpose of it all, and that lined up with the meta level of Lost."

Lindelof was also fascinated by the "cool morality tale" associated with the many, many humans not chosen to be taken away. "We all look at ourselves in the mirror and think, 'Am I good?'" he says. "The fact that there's this reaping which occurred, and you don't make the cut, some of us don't feel worthy, seemed very ripe territory for a cool character drama."

The Book Is Just a Jumping-Off Point

While most of the novel's fundamentals will make the transition, expect major changes and additions. "The pilot will introduce characters and storylines not in the book. It has to," Lindelof says; The Leftovers is a relatively slim novel compared to, say, Game of Thrones. "The book is so rich in characters and details ... and opens so many creative doors," he explains. "But it probably only has enough content for two or three episodes."

Tackling Another Series With a Central Mystery

One of the main mysteries of The Leftovers is just where all the "disappeared" folks went. Lindelof doesn't want to spoil how the book tackles (or doesn't tackle) this question, but he did say the puzzle will be a key part of the show. During their talks, Lindelof and Perrotta agreed the answer to the question "did matter and [viewers] needed to know." Of course, the fact that Lindelof is working on another show with a mystery center is likely to send portions of the Internet into crisis mode today. "I told Tom to brace himself for people asking [about the rapture mystery] as the first question," he says. "And then I told him, 'I don't know if you know this, but I sort of have a reputation for not answering things.'" Lindelof fully admits he's walking into another buzzsaw, but he actually seems to relish the possible backlash. "I guess I can't help myself," he quips. "I'm sure there's a certain subset of viewers who watched Lost until the bitter end and will say, 'I'm just not going to put myself through that again.' But I'm so incredibly magnetized to this concept and the people in this story. It's firing all my creative pistons in a way they haven't been fired since Lost."

For HBO, The Leftovers joins its drama pilots including Criminal Justice, Ben Walker starrer The Missionary and Buda Bridge.