The Leftovers Review

The first season is a hard sit and its reputation for bleakness is deserved: a town full of people in permanent shock, a silent cult that smokes to prove nothing matters, and a police chief coming apart. Then the show moves to Texas and transforms. The second and third seasons are among the most inventive television anyone has made, capable of an episode where a man wakes up as an assassin in a hotel that may be purgatory, and an episode where a woman spends her time on a boat waiting for the world to end, and both are played completely straight.

Carrie Coon gives one of the great television performances, all clenched fury and dark comedy, and Justin Theroux, Ann Dowd and Kevin Carroll are her equals. Max Richter's piano is used almost too well. The flaws are front loaded, in a first season that withholds so relentlessly that many viewers left, and in a habit of building whole hours on a character's dream logic. The finale is a monologue, and it is perfect.