The Leftovers Season 2 almost departed our TV screens before it began, Damon Lindelof has revealed.
Speaking to THR, the co-creator of the HBO series teased the direction of the upcoming second season (premiering Oct. 4), and revealed that he almost ‘cancelled’ his own show:
When the first season ended, I was certainly of the mind of, “Well, maybe we’re done. Maybe this is all there is. We just did a season, ten episodes, of this thing. Is there a compelling reason to continue? What are the story threads that we’d want to explore?” Then we sat down and we started saying, “What does this family look like? What is Garvey 2.0? What does ‘Kevin and Nora’ look like? It seems like Laurie is out of the Guilty Remnant and she’s with Tom but both of them kind of joined these crazy cults, so what would they do next — and is that interesting?” So we basically had the freedom to explore the idea of, “We don’t have to do this if we don’t want to, but if we wanted to, what would it be?”
There were a couple of ideas that we had over the course of the first season of the show, one of which was, “What if there was a town somewhere in the United States where nobody departed, and what would that place be like?” The show felt like it wanted to move somewhere. In that amazing letter to Kevin [at the end of last season], Nora writes, “I need to leave this place. I’m still living in the same house and sitting at the same kitchen table where I suffered this great tragedy. Why?”
Tom wrote the book as kind of a 9/11 parable, or at least that got attributed to it, and now here we are many, many years after 9/11 but there are still the 9/11 widows and widowers who have made that their life. So we were really interested in this idea of breaking free of the grief cycle. I wanted to watch a show about people who were trying to feel better, versus people who are stuck in this washer cycle of mystery. So we started getting excited about some of those ideas and went to HBO and said, “Would you be interested in watching this show?”
You can read the full interview @THR.
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