The Show That's Changing TV

A pioneer among recent surreal shows, The Leftovers brilliantly balances the ordinary and the bizarre.

- Spencer Kornhaber

Two episode into the first season of HBO’s The Leftovers, the beleaguered suburban police chief Kevin Garvey faced an existential crisis because of a bagel. He placed its two halves onto the conveyor belt of the office toaster—but no bagel, toasted or untoasted, materialized on the other side. The camera peered out from inside the toaster’s maw as Kevin peered in; the actor Justin Theroux flared his nostrils and arched his jet-black eyebrows into a visage of horror. Kevin violently slammed the machine against the counter. Still no bagel emerged. Where the hell had it gone?

Kevin, the viewer could guess, was considering two rather bonkers answers. One was that he had lost his mind and not his bagel, and would soon join his delusional father in a mental hospital. The other was that the bagel had supernaturally vanished—in the same way that 140 million people, 2 percent of the Earth’s population, had inexplicably disappeared on October 14, 2011. Either way, Kevin was reevaluating his perception of the world—and viewers were doing the same as they struggled to make sense of what they’d seen on-screen.