Update: Completed the show. My advice? Don't waste your time.
Season 1: 6-7/10
Season 2: 4/10
Season 3: 2/10
Hey cuntses. I've been watching this for the rather lovely TV challenge. It's one of those shows that's not massively well-known or revered, but has a handful of devotees who consider it the greatest thing since sliced things. Figured I'd share some thoughts...
The premise is that 2% of the world's population inexplicably disappears in an instant. Nobody knows how or why. And the show cleverly doesn't explore or care how or why it happened. It's purely about the fucked-up, destroyed people who are left behind.
Ultimately what we've got is a meditation on grief. Not just sadness or depression, but pure fucking soul-ripped-to-shreds grief. When people are grieving in our world, everyone rallies around them, to drag them back to some semblance of normalcy. Here, there is no normalcy, because everyone is grieving. There's no one left emotionally capable of bringing others back from the edge of the abyss. There's no one left who knows what normal even fucking is. Bizarre, irrational, unexplainable behaviour is the new norm. Weirdness here is not for the sake of weirdness, but because that's the only thing that makes sense in the overall context.
The conventional religions no longer hold any comfort, so people splinter off into weird cults. One involves a messianic charlatan who takes away pain, whilst covertly impregnating hot Asian bitches. Another cult takes a vow of silence and chain-smokes their days away, believing that a forsaken race can no longer place value on trivialities like breath. There's some genuinely profound stuff here, about the desperation for meaning where there is none, particularly poignant given that, at some point, we'll all no longer exist, with no hint available for why we're even fucking here to begin with and no clue what happens after we're gone.
It's all heavy going and exhausting, in a good way. BUT, and there is a big but... the showrunner is Damon Lindelof, the dude who made Lost and the moderately cool sequel to Watchmen. In true Lindelof style, there's threads of faux-depth running through the series. A single issue of National Geographic pops up here and there. Some viewers went to the trouble of tracking down that issue and it contains a bunch of unimportant easter eggs for the show. Like, the main article in that issue is about Cairo, Egypt. One of the episodes takes place in Cairo, New York. OMG YOU GUYS, ISN'T THAT CLEVER??? There's also a random reoccurance of people watching the shitty '80s sitcom Perfect Strangers; a thread that means nothing and goes nowhere.
I've watched the first season, 10 episodes worth, and I'm still not sure if I even especially like it. But I do know that I'm hooked and intrigued to see where it goes. There's a rare combo of weird surrealism and big, earth-shaking emotions at work here - broadly similar to say Twin Peaks or Dark or Six Feet Under. Worth checking out out if you dug any of them. It's strange and human and unique and unpredictable. Oh yeah, and there's also some good tits, a young Margaret Qualley in her undies, and one of the most genuinely brutal kills I've seen in quite a while.
I'll keep y'all posted on how I go in the next 2 seasons, if anyone cares. All I know is, I'm gonna be annoyed as fuck if the whole thing ends up being some lame alien abduction shit.