The Leftovers

Many will hate it. But there will be viewers in whom it strikes a chord so deeply that they will feel themselves overwhelmed by it in the best possible way: not like they're drowning in the misery, but like it's teaching them a new way to breathe.

It's pretty grim stuff — but quite engrossing and worth your time.

For now, though, The Leftovers is properly mesmerizing.

Based on co-creator Tom Perrotta’s 2011 book, The Leftovers imagines a range of responses (and too often, responses accompanied by anxiety-making piano or violin trills).

Grim it sounds and grim it is, but in choosing to focus on the kind of survival stories that no one signs up for but that to some extent eventually shape us all, it can be unexpectedly eloquent about love and loss.

It’s worth watching even when it’s not easy.

Once the show gets going, and it takes more than one episode to do so, The Leftovers bores into the characters and the fissures that crack their community so astutely that the cause is almost secondary.

The Leftovers is overwhelmingly, existentially serious, without succumbing to the relentlessly violent and masculine clichés of so much “serious” prestige TV.

If Lindelof and Perrotta can somehow strike a balance of the human, emotional fallout while also delving into an explanation of the oddities involved in "the sudden departure," then The Leftovers could be one of the more riveting new series.

Even the best version of The Leftovers, if it proves a complete creative success, will not be a show for everyone. Yet it believes fervently, messily, heartbreakingly, that even two percent of everyone means more than you can imagine.

The show delivers on an exceedingly intriguing premise, with some of the most beguilingly morose performances delivered this year. It’s a strange but good wallow.

With only tiny snatches of dark humor in the early episodes, it’s sure to be too grim for some viewers. But for those who can take it, The Leftovers is fascinating and involving, like nothing we’ve seen on TV unless you think of it as the flip side of resurrection dramas such as “The Returned.

Because it’s so dark, and all the characters--like the teenage daughter--are destructive, it comes off as extremely depressing, even difficult to watch.

As a meditation on grief, The Leftovers can be oppressive.... As a mystery, however, it's gripping.

A baffling, beautiful, maddening, provocative puzzle.

An intriguing study in how regular Joes react to inexplicable events, the show demands a level of patience bound to result in its own “Sudden Departure” of at least some viewers.

The narrative flow is murky and chaotic, and at times it chokes up.... But The Leftovers builds in potency.

There's enough intrigue driving the premise to set The Leftovers up as a promising series; whether the show can maintain its momentum or succumbs to the weight of the myriad, potentially frustrating mysteries behind it remains to be seen.

The fact that the show remains watchable, if challenging, is a testament to Perrotta and Lindelof's convincing portrait of how our society might respond to such an event. And Theroux's performance is a much-needed anchor to humanity.

By the time the first episode ends, “The Leftovers” has planted enough interest to make you want to stick around. By the time the third installment unfolds, the action really heats up.

Flawed but fascinating. ... At times it can seem too proud of its virtuous noncommerciality; its slowness can seem shallow, its artiness willful. I'm still not sure what kind of show it wants to be ... But I'm going to stick with it.

Viewers’ patience for the show and its dreamlike pace will likely depend on their appetites for soul-searching about the afterlife.

It’s not that The Leftovers isn’t great storytelling, because it is. It’s just befuddling, violent and sad--more and more all the time, with no satisfaction in sight. Theroux is flat-out fantastic and Emmy-worthy in this role.

The Leftovers is interesting television, even if, in the early going, it's not quite sure of what it wants to be or where it wants to go.

What we're left with in The Leftovers is a show that, at least early on, is nothing but chaos and dread and bleakness and chill, as it relentlessly delves into the most troubling aspects of human nature.

The first few episodes don’t showcase enough artistry to justify all the slogging and weeping, the bloodied faces and broken hearts. But I’d be lying if I said The Leftovers didn’t fascinate me.

While there may still be doubts about the sustainability of The Leftovers, it clearly seems to be moving in a positive direction creatively even as the show’s overall tone grows more pessimistic.

An uneven yet at times emotionally engrossing series that hasn't quite figured out an appropriate or clear tone to dramatize this mystifying meditation on loss, sustained grief and tested, twisted faith.

There's deliberate and there's plodding. This is plodding. Indeed, the jittery camera work and abrupt flashbacks almost take it from plodding to stumbling.... The acting styles differ greatly, yet none of the capable regulars hits a false note, whether playing subdued rage or over-the-top fervor.

We don’t get enough of a sense of the characters’ ordinary emotional lives, which means we can’t easily bond with them; we only see their feverish flares of anger and their smoldering discontent as the episodes run forward. If we could spend a few subtle minutes with a character such as Kevin, look into his eyes and feel his sorrow, the show would have a more honest emotional potency.

None of the performances so far are enough to override or ameliorate all the concoctions and detours of the TV version.

In the end, you may not be able to escape the feeling that the material, worthy and well-presented though it may be, is being forced into a format for which it's unsuited.

What keeps the show interesting beyond Perrotta’s set-up is the cast.... It’s a program designed to come at its theme from a number of angles--religious, familial, societal, etc.--but the multi-voiced approach leads to a lack of consistency at its core.

With The Leftovers, we know very little and care less and less as the story slouches along.

Despite a big-name cast that includes Amy Brenneman and Liv Tyler, at times feels like less than the sum of its parts. At least initially, the series is driven largely by its tone (Max Richter’s score is especially helpful in that regard), and it’s bound to make people think, which is by itself something of an accomplishment.

Some of the bolder horror-movie devices admittedly hint at the development of a richer series.... But those thematics aren't allowed to consistently breathe, primarily because the characters too often function as obvious shorthand placeholders for viewer projection.

The lack of a coherent storyline, even in a piece dedicated to exploring the lack of coherence in the world, makes The Leftovers a frustrating challenge.

Despite the silky quality of its production, The Leftovers is a pretty grim and suffocating proposition.

Though it is expertly made, with evident commitment and passion and art behind and before the camera, I also found it on the whole frustrating and unsatisfying. ... It feels that only half a story, the grim part, is being told.

Lots of hearts are likely to harden in resistance to the calculated grimness, the nightmarish images. Not to mention the preening incoherence that pervades this script based on a novel by Tom Perrotta, a work whose measured tone bears no resemblance whatever to the goings on here.