Tomorrow - Episode 95: Tom Perrotta's interpretations

Episode Date: June 21, 2017

This week Josh sits down with Tom Perrotta, the Academy Award nominated screenwriter, author, and co-creator of HBO's The Leftovers. If you've never seen the show: Spoilers for the finale lie ahead. If you have, expect a wave of supernatural eruptions, psychedelia, religion, and penis scanners. If you're not paying attention, you may even get buried alive. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hey and welcome to tomorrow, I'm your host Joshua Tupulski. Today in the podcast, we discuss cults, penis scanners, and supernatural eruptions. The first award for my sponsor. Whether you're a small business owner or a first time blogger, HostGator has all the tools you need to build and host your website. HostGator's 24-7 expert support is always available to assist you via live chat or email anytime you have a question. There's even a 45-day money back guarantee, so if you decide it's not for you, there's no problem. that support is always available to assist you via live chat or email anytime you have a question.

There's even a 45-day money back guarantee, so if you decide it's not for you, there's no problem. Go to hosegator.com slash tomorrow to sign up and get 60% off. [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ Quick note before we get into the show today, we are talking to the creator of the leftovers, and so we're gonna be talking a lot about the HBO show of the leftovers, and so we are going to be talking

a lot about the HBO show, The Leftovers, which has just ended after three seasons. If you haven't seen the show, which I highly recommend, I'll just give you a quick synopsis. It takes place three years after an event called the departure where millions of people, 2% of the world's population has disappeared from the planet, and there's all sorts of cults, and people are very confused and depressed, and in various states of despair. And it's pretty heavy, but also really funny, and gets really crazy in the second and third season.

It was written by Tom Perada. It was co-created by Perada and Damon Lindelof of Lost Fame. And I just wanna say, before we get into this conversation, there are significant spoilers for the show. So if you haven't seen it, maybe watch the show and then listen to this or listen to this, you won't know what we're talking about,

really, and then watch the show. My guest today is a novelist and Oscar-nominated screenwriter, best known for his novel's election and little children. Most recently, he is very well known for the HBO show, The Leftovers, which he created and wrote an executive produced i'm of course talking about tom parada tom thank you for being here at my pleasure

uh... so so i i last night on twitter i i i i said i'm gonna interview you and i asked a lot of people about the show i by the way i became a huge fan of the second in the third season and one of the questions I got, and I don't know, this is sort of a meta question, but I don't know if you want to talk about as he can, but what was interesting to me is there is, there's a huge shift from the first season of the show,

I feel there's this almost reboot of the show in the second season, which I was totally caught off guard by. And admittedly, I kind of hate watch the first season. This is a horrible way to start the interview, but the first season, I was like, this is intriguing and then made me angry. And by the end of it, I was like,

I'm never watching the show again. And then I put on the second season. And I was like, holy shit, this is amazing. Can you talk a little bit about that transition or if that was intentional or, you know, what was there a decision made to change the tone or the place? Like, can you speak to that at all?

Yeah, yeah. You know, I think the way that I actually answer this question is to say that the tone shifted midway through the season one. It was still extremely dark, but I feel like if you watch episode six of season one, you know, it's called guest. It's about Nora at a departure-related convention. She has an encounter with these loved ones, dolls, that are mannequins to help people grieve for the departed.

She has a screaming fight with this health-help author. It's a pretty funny, weird episode. There's no violence, and then it ends with that amazing, holy rain, hug. And I feel like we were just, and it also begins with Nora being shot by a prostitute while she's wearing a bulletproof vest. I just felt like the show was sort of suddenly beginning

to understand all the emotional bandwidth that could accommodate. Before that, we had maybe been a little too narrow and all the emotional bandwidth that could accommodate. Before that, we had maybe been a little too narrow and seeing it as a kind of, you know, some people would call it like, Greece porn at that point. So even then, I feel like there were flashes of humor

like when Kevin loses the bagel in episode two. But anyway, I feel like we started to understand the show that we wanted to understand the show that we wanted to write toward the end of season one and then we had time to reflect on it between those seasons and we knew we were free of the book and then we were able to move the story. And I don't know what happened. It was just like the show got weirder.

It got funnier. But it still retained. And I think maybe we just honed a sharper sense of what the show was about and sort of about all forms of religious thinking, including like, you know, atheistic thinking about religion. So I don't know, I just think it happens with some shows. Some shows are born and you see what they are

in the very first episode and other shows sort of evolve over time and find themselves. And I think the leftovers is, you know, the ladder. And so you felt like you actually, you had to take a step back and look at it as a formed thing to see where it could go as a piece of television. Is that?

Yeah, and I think unless a show has a very, very clear sense of genre, you know, you would have to do that between seasons anyway. It's sort of like, what do we want to do now? And the leftovers, there were really no models for the show. It's post-apocalyptic in a certain sense, but it's not like any other post-apocalyptic show. It was as much a family drama as it was in apocalyptic show. And it didn't have a kind of survivalist narrative. It was really like, how can these people be?

Is it possible for these people to be okay given what has happened to them in their world? Right. And one of the other things about it is not just being a family drama or post-apocalyptic, but one of the things that I took note of early on, and I think you just expanded on massively in the second and third season, is this almost psychedelic, there's psychedelic moments of the show, These almost like drug trip-esque moments, which I think, interestingly, it seems to be like a trend that I feel

like you guys were early on in television now. Now you see things like Legion or Preacher. These really kind of American gods shows that are very trippy. How much was there an intention to create this kind of thin membrane between what is imagined, what is felt or imagined and what is actually happening?

Yeah, well, you know, here's one of the many points where I have to, you know, give huge credit to Damon Lindelof. You know, when I wrote the book, what I wanted to do was set up a situation. My sense of religion is this. All religions have this eruption of the supernatural that happened way in the past that nobody can access. And what we get is a narrative built around that supernatural moment, whether it's 2000 years ago or longer than that. And we hear in our scriptures that there were miracles and there was divine intervention in the world.

But as far as we know, we're living in a pretty ordinary world. We're just slogging through our lives. And I was just trying to put the event to the story as close as I could to the supernatural eruption. So it was just three years after. So it was basically, it was almost like our characters were American suburbanites, but they're living in biblical times. But I was really like treating it in a completely realistic way.

And I think Damon, who is much more interested in science fiction and fantasy and comic books kind of brought his sensibility to bear. And I think where you really see it is with the character of Kevin. Because in the book, Kevin is basically the guy saying like, hey, let's just get back to normal. Let's go back to our lives. Our lives were good. Let's not lose what was good about, let's keep our families together, let's keep our town going. Let's start playing softball again. It was almost a comic role of a guy who just was intent on going back to the way things were. going back to the way things were. And instead, I think Damon really pushed to send Kevin

on this, what was either a religious journey or a descent into madness. And I think, if you look at religious narrative, the two are almost always tied together. I think that putting our central character into this kind of um place where he's not sure if he has a religious

mission or if he's losing his mind kind of created that trippy quality that you're talking about so what's interesting about that is is you're saying that that you're you're sort of intention for this story was about like a post sort of religious uh... supernatural experience and how people are grappling with that or at least partially. But the second and third season absolutely seems to put a at least in the storytelling

from my view is it puts a present day or a sort of a notion of supernatural occurrences in real time in the story, right? So how did that change? Like what this actually was about? I mean, does that shift the focus from being about how you deal with something that has happened to how you deal with something that is currently a happening, or is it all on the part

of that same continuum? Well, you know, so I think Adainman was playing off the essential story in the book, which, you know, this thing has happened, this departure has happened, people are reeling from it, but they don't have a religious explanation for it. And in the book, you have three sort of cults arising out of the departure. The guilty remnant is the main one, but there's also a holy wane who is either a charlatan or a miracle worker. Then there's a group called the Barefoot People who barely made it into the book.

I think the big change was to get Kevin into a religious situation where he's being haunted by Patty who, and the question is, is that madness or is something else going on there? Right, and that is sort of, we don't ever come to, I'm sure people must ask us all the time, right? Or like, what really happened? I mean, one of the things that I'm sure people must ask us all the time, right? Like, what really happened?

I mean, I, you know, one of the things that I think is it must be interesting for you. Like, Damon has this, I'm not gonna say baggage, but he's got this kind of legacy of lost behind him, right? Where the expectations for resolution are so high. I mean, knowing that you guys had kind of a short, you know, this is a three-season show, there must have been an enormous expectation from people who were fans of this show, and you must get questions all the time, like what was real and what wasn't,

or what did this really mean, or what didn't mean? I mean, do you guys have definitive answers for certain things? I could ask you, you know, Kevin's experiences on the other side, you know, the International Assassin episode, right? Is that what is it, is that the right title? I believe it is. That, you know, which, assassin episode, right? Is that what it is? Is that the right title?

I believe it is. You know, which, which, which, when I saw, I was like, my mind was blown, it was just so completely out of, you know, it just took you into this whole other space, you know, how much of that is fact or fiction. And by the way, is it important to say like this happened or didn't happen? Yeah, well, this is, you're at the heart of what went on in our writers room. Because I started out with the idea that departure stands for what is unknowable in the world. For all the religious thinking that's gone on and humans have been on the planet,

I, as an agnostic, I don't think anyone has the truth about what happens when we die. I just think this is an unknown. Now, I spend my life interacting with people who think they do know. That's just the human condition. Some people think Jesus died and came back from the dead and some people don't think that's the case at all. You know, when we're in the realm of faith and religious stories, my sense is that these things are unknowable. You make a decision to believe them.

You can't know whether they actually happen. You know, somebody wants to show the shroud of Turin because finally, thank God, we have proof. Right. But I don't think these things are provable. And so, one of the rules that we tried to adhere to as much as possible was if we did venture into a potentially supernatural space like International Assassin, that there would also be a kind of real world explanation that could just as easily account for this. So Kevin took some sort of poison. He was in a state that was

you know in a way a coma or something like that that he was in an altered state and he had a vision that was some heightened form of dream that actually had a positive effect. And like he did spiritual warfare in his dream and came out of it, which is problem or less solved. Like I think that's a plausible model for what happened there. Or you could say in a kind of Greer Gmiff sort of way,

he traveled into the world of the dead and did battle that is adversary there and came back from it. I think you know we really tried in our own minds to say this works best if there's more than one explanation and then it's up to the reader in the same way that it's up to us as human beings to accept or reject a religious narrative. Right, but at some point he crawls out of the ground, right? I mean, sorry, this is, and this is what I just think about a lot, which is, in some way, he like crawls literally is buried and crawls out of the ground. That happens in the show. It's witnessed by another character. Is there, is there, I mean, I guess I guess, you know, okay, in this drunken-do state, he went out

into the forest buried himself in dirt. I mean, I guess there's an explanation for it. No, yeah, no, I think, right. But this is something that we we looked at if you if you just google people buried alive you will find that that um... their story there are multiple stories that people have lived through being buried alive and people were mistaken for dead buried in the ground you know and then emerge now i don't think it happens every day,

but the leftovers are sort of daring you in that sense to solve yourself for a few things of yourself. I mean, and look, Michael and John and Matt, when they talked to Kevin in season three, Kevin is denying that there's anything special about him. And they're like, but look, I shot you and you didn't die. And I, you know, you came out of the ground.

You, you know, you should have drowned, but there was an earthquake, like clearly amazing things are happening around Kevin. Right. But it's just as likely he's in the right place at the right time or it's perceived one way, but actually something. I mean, what we see is, or what they see, rather, would be their perception of it, which may not match perfectly with reality. Yeah, yeah.

And look, every time there's a disaster, somebody is saved in some very unlikely way. And the only way they can explain it is to say, you know, God was looking out for me. And then the carl area of that is unharbled, which is, but he wasn't looking out for those other people. He must have had something against them. And so, I think, maybe I'm being too defensive here, but I think we tried to structure stories

so that you could interpret things in a religious way, or you could interpret them in a kind of, the world is a really weird place and strange things happen every day. Right, which is actually what the, a lot of the tension from me watching the show was and thinking about the story, because you know, there's part of it

where when you're watching, you're trying to say, I'm saying, what is this about, ultimately, right? Because you've got certain episodes where the entirety of the episode is just this tight sort of dramatic exchange between two or three people and it's almost as if that's a it's not a bottle episode, but it's this kind of moment that can stand on its own. But then the arc of the show, it seems to be getting somewhere the whole time, right? And I've

actually had a debate with people, you know, is this a show about the supernatural, is this a show about dealing with grief, is this a show about the supernatural, is this a show about dealing with grief, is this a show about asking questions that you can't answer? Is it all of those things? Is there one that you thought like, this is what we're trying to say with this as a piece of art? Well, all of those things come under the rubric, I think, the rubric I think of, how do we explain the mysterious and unknowable things in our lives? And so all these characters are in search of a story that makes sense to them.

And in the end, as you know, from the finale, I think, and you know it from the season finales of each of the respective seasons, we were really concerned with, can these people be okay? Can they make a family together? Can they keep their sanity? And can they find love and happiness? Those were ultimately, we decided the most important questions of the show, rather than can they find the answer to what happened and why in the past. I think it's really about how they make a decision to forge ahead knowing that this horrible thing

happened recently. Right, and yet, when you know it's a horrible thing, right, they're not even sure about that. Right, you know, the horrible thing. Maybe everybody's, they're all ahead of it. That's the, that's the, right, the alternative is that the left over,

the people who had departed are having a great time somewhere. And everybody on Earth is stuck in their horrible post-apocalyptic lives. Exactly. Exactly. But that to me mirrors the way we're all trying to get on with our daily lives without, you know, our world is unjust in all sorts of ways. Some people have decided that they find meaning in life and fighting that injustice. Other people are just trying to, you know, see their families and get through the day and still other people are following these

dreams for personal fulfillment. It's like we don't all agree even about the nature of the reality that we're living in, but we're all trying to find a narrative that allows us to live in it. Right. And so, yeah, there is this sort of open to interpretation. Angle. And yet, I'll challenge you a little bit. Like on the final episode, you've got Nora,

who has come to actually be, you know, in some ways the central character of the show, explaining this kind of incredible experience, where I mean, I mean, I was sort of was very confused about this, and not necessarily in a negative way, but it left me with like a thousand questions. She tells this story about having gone through, used this device to, and I'm guessing that

Damon had a heavy influence on this idea of the device and this sort of, this trip, but going to the other side, essentially, where the people who had departed were living, and essentially kind of an alternate version of our reality. Is that, I mean, this is a stupid question. Did that happen? Is that, is she just telling a story? Like, what am I supposed to take away from that? And how important is that to the...

I think he met you in the same question. Sorry, I know, I know. I do, but in this case, like specifically, it's not like a vague thing. She says, I went through the machine, I showed up in this whole other place, everybody's gone, I saw my family. I mean, it's very specific, it's not vague at all. What is the, what are we supposed to think about that? You know, I think you have at least two paths in the same way you do with with Kevin's and

You know one of the reasons we didn't show Norris journey and we just had her tell it. I think is to put people in in the same position that You know we're in in relation to a religious narrative. We have to decide to believe it. Right. Having the faith essentially. He has to, when she says, you don't believe me or why don't, or do you believe me and he says, why wouldn't I, that's essentially a religious decision that he's making. That's right. He's saying, I have faith in you and she needs to hear that. Now, he can have faith in something that's real or he can have faith in something that's not real.

Now, my argument is that the story is essentially the same whether it happened or it didn't, because what Nora is saying to Kevin is, I have given up on the idea of being reunited with my family, which, you know, if we look at their breakup in an episode four, you know, he's saying, you can't be with me in this world because you're drawn to, you haven't resolved the loss of your kids. You haven't made peace with what happened in the departure. And she's agreeing. She hasn't. She can't really fully be with him.

And you know, he can't fully be with her because he's deep into this other side too. And so I would say that what you see in episode seven is Kevin rejecting the other side for this world. And what you see in episode eight is nor are rejecting the other side for this world. So for the first time in that scenario, you see two people who are fully in this world. So for the first time in that scenario, you see two people who are fully in this world together. And then, yeah, so that's like, to me, that's sort of the important part of the ending. Now, whether Nora went there or whether she is telling a story to

reflect some insight that she's had, she's in effect creating a fiction to tell a truth about herself. The outcome is the same either way. Tomorrow is also brought to you by HelloFresh. HelloFresh is the meal kit delivery service that makes cooking more fun so you can focus on the whole experience not just the final plate. Each week HelloFresh creates new delicious recipes with step-by-step instructions designed to take around 30 minutes for everyone from novices to seasoned home cooks short on time. And Hello Fresh sources, the freshest ingredients

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It's potentially a global idea. I imagine that people in different religious traditions would account for the event differently and would behave differently, but I decided to tell it in a kind of microcosm of this sort of American suburban world that I often write about. And even as we were dealing with that microcosm in season one, you know, we were thinking about ways to expand it. And I think bringing Miracle into it in season two was a really smart one. And, you know, there were probably other ways, you know, we didn't have to jump to where we jumped.

You know, we skipped how many years from season two to season three. It's a whole, it's a number of years, like three years go by. So I think you could have probably told stories in that period. I mean, it just depends on how you break it down. Right. So the plan was for a larger arc? Well, you know, this is the interesting thing about serialized television is at least in our case, you know, HBO makes their decisions one year at a time.

I mean, you know, I think it might be different for something like Game of Thrones where you have seven books and, you know, they can say if we're going to do this, we're going to commit to telling this whole saga and maybe that, you know, seven seasons, maybe that's eight seasons to do that. But we just had we had the book and they said, okay, let's make we made a pilot and they said, let's make season one and then between season one and season two they said, all right, let's make another. And as you know, our viewership actually dropped between season one and season two. And so you know, our viewership actually dropped between season one and season two. And so, you know, we were aware of the fact that we might not have season three,

but we didn't come to HBO at the very beginning and say, here are five seasons of the leftovers that we want to tell. We really, we had the book and we had an idea for season one, but we, you know, that's as far as we were able to go. So I think what would have happened if HVO said you can have two more seasons is we would have looked at dividing the narrative in different ways. There were certainly, I would have loved to see more about Jill and college. I would have loved to see more about John Murphy and Erica Murphy.

Maybe there were new characters that we could have brought in season three in the way that we did in season two. I mean, I just think there are all sorts of other ways to tell a story and come out at the same place. I wonder if it's interesting to think about that it's sort of the show having a larger wider sort of path. Because at some point, I mean, you look at something like 9-11 and at some point we get used to it, right?

I mean, you sort of go, this happened and, you know, now we're living in this post-9-11 world and it seemed very raw at the beginning and now I think where we're at, at this point is we've all kind of, it's in our memory, you know, it's not a present. I mean, the departure is a very present, even years after me, the final season is what, seven years after, right? And still massively present. Would you've gotten to a point, do you think, where it didn't matter anymore to a lot of people, where it just was this kind of mundane thing,

humming along in the background? Well, I would, yes, and I think this was exactly what the show was trying, and the book we're trying to examine was, you know, there are these events that sort of divide the world into before and after. And some people live with a sense that this event was the single most important thing that ever happened and other people move on. And so the book is really about the tension between the people who want to move on and the people who want to remember.

And the guilty remnant stands for the people who want to remember. And I was very much reflecting on 9-11 at that point, because I think in the immediate aftermath of that, we just thought our world has changed forever and profound ways. And I think that insight is true. We're still fighting a war in Afghanistan that is the result of 9-11. And so for soldiers who died there last week,

and for their families, 9-11 remains this huge event. But most of us have moved on. And I'm always struck like when I read Art Spiegelman's mouse, his parents were Holocaust survivors. And there they were living in the American suburbs in the 50s in this world of optimism and Elvis. But they were people who had only a few years before been in death camps and seen this is incredibly horrific thing.

And I think really, part of the leftovers is exploring these events that for some people are completely central and destabilizing and that other people are able to kind of relegate to the past and say we've started over, we're on a new narrative now. And even with the leftovers, I think that the seven-year anniversary has created this eruption of apocalyptic fever. But in other ways, the world has moved on. Like the Australian wedding, the goat there, isn't slaughtered. It's treated, it's like there's this kind of

sense that the world's gotten a little kinder and gentler. That normality has begun to deepen to it. I think in Miracle, when that goat is slaughtered in a restaurant, that's just the sense that things are really raw and present in that world. And later, I think by the seventh year, things are a little calmer. Like everybody's expecting it to blow up. But then when Tom and Jill call Lori, they're kind of marking the holiday together. They're like, oh, you shouldn't be alone on this day. But there is an sense that the world is about to blow, even though we kind of stoked those feelings early on. Every year, in the anniversary of 9-11, I think it does become fresh again.

Is one of the ways our memory works? Yeah, it's interesting. As a TV show TV show, there is no, you're right. I mean, I think you said there wasn't a model for it for this kind of narrative. But there isn't, I'm trying to map out, like, what is the dramatic conclusion? And you guys went to a place that was almost like the anti-climax at the end of it,

where it was like the worst thing that could happen happened where we think it's gonna happen. And what actually happens is life goes on. I mean, it's this really interesting, you know, art that you've got to, I mean, thinking about it as a kind of, as a television project, right? I mean, at the end of the day, like you're telling a story, and the story has this sort of artistry at its foundation and this sort of need to be, to be told or to be heard, but you've got to express it, like you've got to have a guy who's doing the lights, and you've

got to put cameras on people, and you've got to express it. Like, you've got to have a guy who's doing the lights and you've got to put cameras on people and you've got to write lines and turn it into some kind of, you know, this television show, which could be very thin. I feel like that must have been, was that frustrating to have to figure out like, how do we create this dramatic, you know, you gotta hang on to the next episode, ARC, when the actual story is really, it's not.

It's subtle. I mean, and what we've been talking about here, what you're saying, the kind of tension is, is a subtle tension, you know? Yeah, and I think this was the, you're right, it was a huge challenge for us. And I think one of the ways that we, one of the things we learned was that we could let the show be subtle, that our character's states of mind were really what was the subject of the show. If you go back to the pilot, you'll see that there's a lot of physical violence.

And the dogs, dogs and stuff, right? The dogs being shot, you know, Kevin gets, uh, when he gets removed from the guilty remnant house is sort of slammed against the car. There's this riot where he's like hitting people with, uh, with his night stick. And I think we were operating in maybe a more conventional space of like social chaos and breakdown that is familiar to people who watch apocalyptic shows. And what we discovered was, what's really novel about this in a place

that where it works best is a conference related to the departure where people are making speeches or a town that gives tours to celebrate the fact that it was untouched by the departure, that these spaces that were closer to normal were the places where the weirdness came out the most and the places where maybe we pushed it into a more conventional arena, the show seemed less special. Who came up with the penis scanner? Tell me a little bit about how that was introduced as a concept in the writers room or however

you guys did this. You know, it's very funny. I'm not sure where exactly it came, ever since the jogging scene in the pilot. There have been a lot of jokes related to Kevin and his endowment. And, you know, in international assassin, he gets a pat down from security guards who say, oh, congratulations. Oh, I didn't realize that. I didn't put this together.

This is a running theme throughout the show. Yeah, it's a bit of a running joke. So I honestly can't remember where came out what what funny for me was that i was like okay that's that's funny but i didn't really get stuck on about when the show came out of the it's got what's in the that disproportionate amount of uh... commentary

that it is a very funny idea but but there's so many weird ideas floating around on an episode of the leftovers especially one that takes place on the other side that all I can say is that it's a little amazing, that's not much attention to cut. Right, I mean, the final season, there's some true absurdity happening, right? The perfect strangers thing. I mean, that whole episode, which is called,

sorry, what was the title of the episode? Don't be ridiculous. Don't be ridiculous. Sorry, I was like, what's the catch? What's Balky's catch phrase? I mean, that episode was, I, I, it started with it, I mean, just the music, right? And then, and I'm like, okay, what is this music?

I know it. I couldn't place it that I remembered. But that whole, I mean, is that, there's the humor in the final season is so at the surface. I mean, is that, was that, I mean, was it intentional just to go crazy? Was it intentional to go, just to go a little bit more light, or was that also a reflection of that the characters coming out of this kind of darkness into something that felt like normalcy or like they could laugh again. You know, there was this post 9-11 sentiment, it's the end of sarcasm, you know, like we

can't be, you know, comedy, you can never do comedy again after 9-11 or be snarky. And that obviously has turned out to not be true. It was this kind of coming back into the normalcy, it's this these kind of ridiculous moments or was it just the absurdity of? Yeah, you know. I think it's partly a reflection of the world of the show, and partly a reflection of the mood in the writers room. I can't really explain it.

You know, the first year, it was a heavy room, and it was a heavy show. And I think the second year, we sort of found the right balance for the show. And we kind of started to understand it more clearly and to realize that there was more room for absurdity and humor. And then I think because we were ending the third year, there was just like a kind of, there was an exuberance there that that i think might be hard for

and yet i think you see it in the show in various ways and it remains a emotionally wrenching experience for people but there is this kind of wild humor in it that um... that that we really embrace and i think the fact that we knew we were ending uh... was part of it and then i think you know a lot of it comes from person who's leading the room and I think the fact that we knew we were ending was part of it. And then I think, you know, a lot of it comes from the person who's leading the room.

And I think Damon started to feel like the show worked best at those moments when people were somebody in the room was going like, you can't do this. This is outrageous. This is beyond the pale. Like, like, that was the space that he wanted to operate operate in that's where the dick scanner came from yeah exactly exactly and you know the musical choices would sometimes highlight that you know we cheesy odd music playing against something that was really emotional with wood emotional would create the kind of mood that felt left over to us. Yeah, it's interesting. I mean, that whole episode where he's the president, you know, it's like that interaction

with the children, you know, whose shoes had been missing. It actually makes the absurdity of that moment somehow make that exchange feel more heavy in a way I thought you know it was like in the midst of this lightness there's actually still a core of dark sort of a cloud that is there you know which was really interesting I mean that of course the you know the dick scanner there's really no there's no dark side to that whatsoever that's all joy but I will say you know in all these cases especially for you know people who are you know, in all these cases, especially for, you know, people who are, you know, wanting to kind of separate season one from the rest of the show, all these things are direct callbacks to season one, you know, when the kid says there is no family, there's

a sign that Patty held up and showed to Kevin and I think the second episode of the show and perfect strangers also appeared in the second episode of the show and perfect strangers also appeared in the second episode of the show. Oh, really? Yeah, yeah, that's Kevin Garvey seniors in the mental hospital in Kevin, goes to visit him and that's what he's watching and he says all four of them disappeared

and then in season two mark win baker is caught on the lamb in mexico because he's like fake oh right oh wow that really is i kind of didn't i mean i this is truly a show in the that's for the built for the age of the internet i mean these are things that that had i spent a little i mean how i spent more time read like researching this on reddit i assume that i would have made the connection that all those all. I did not remember that he is, that there's a perfect stranger's thread running through the entire arc of the show,

which is impressive, an impressive piece of, the press of he's a writing or trolling, I'm not sure which, but either way, it's really, it's really incredible. Okay, so I know you gotta go, but I have a couple other quick things.

First, are there misconceptions that people have about this show that you would like to dispel or things that you hear and just think, oh, they completely got it wrong? No, I mean, if you present a few specific ones, I might be able to answer that, but I do think that we created something that tried to avoid a kind of definitive interpretation, and so we can't complain if people come up with alternative theories.

I can think they're wrong in the same way that they can think somebody else is wrong, but I can't claim to be irritated by it because it is a show that puts both viewers and characters into a position where they're, you know, the meaning-making parts of their brain are in overdrive. Right, you'd be kind of a jerk if you presented a show with lots of options and then we're mad that people had different opinions about it. No, you're right. I'm dumb for asking the question. You literally just said, like, you know,

it's up to interpretation. It's said to be very rude of you to say that their interpretation was wrong. Yeah, but I will say that, you know, there are people who are obnoxious about thinking that they, you know, I think the people who wanted a definitive, a really definitive interpretation often had kind of a hostile attitude toward the show.

And I understand that. We weren't giving people some of the things that they conventionally expect from stories like this. And so I understand that that could be frustrating. And there is, especially with audiences where you've got the internet audience, where you've got to read it, you know, group sort of talking about this stuff. Like I interviewed Damon years ago about loss, we had this long interview, and I completely didn't get the ending of it. I was like, I just don't understand how this all works. Like I don't understand the machinery of how this thing works.

And people, I remember there were comments on the YouTube thread, people were so mad at me for not understanding the end of loss. Like there was this real passion about, I wanted it to be, or I perceived it to be this way, and that's the way it's got to be. And if you don't see it that way, which I find it to be a strange sort of, with art, which is typically supposed to have some level of,

you know, your take on it in the mix. It's interesting to see how passionate people get if they feel like they're not served or underserved or served differently than they expected on a story. Which is- Yeah, I was very struck by this. People are very, very smart. And in some ways, you know, are able to read into the show and interpret the show in ways

that are like kind of awe-inspiring to us because they go sometimes way deeper than we consciously went. But people want a kind of reassurance from stories. They can be very sophisticated in every other way, but if a story doesn't provide them reassurance, they can get very cranky. They can turn violent. Okay, so the leftovers is done. There's not going to be any more leftovers, right? Are we seeing the last of it? Are you happy to be done with it? Are you happy to have put it to bed? You feel like you've got your younger system? I did. I think we ended strong and that is a really

good feeling. I don't feel like we left anything on the field to use a good coach metaphor. And I started writing the book in 2008 or 2009. So it's been a huge chunk of my life in eight or nine years spent thinking about the leftovers. So I'm ready to move on and I have a new book coming out in August called Mrs. Fletcher, which is kind of a return to some of the concerns I had before the leftovers.

It has a lot in common with a book like Little Children, It's About, you know, Sex and Suburbia, to put it in the broadest possible terms in the about culture wars in America. Did you grow up in the suburbs? Yeah, I grew up in a working class, the suburb outside of New York City,

a town called Garland in New Jersey. There seems to be a theme, you know, and not to go down a rabbit hole here, but with some of this work where there's this kind of incredible pain that not everybody, but everybody, it seems the character is a lot of your characters and habits, incredible pain under this facade or this incredible pain and this sort of grappling with things in secret that almost like all characters share,

but are all distinct in some way. I mean, little children, they're certainly a plethora of that to go around. And this new book, Mrs. Fletcher, I mean, I assume it's not a romcom. Ha, ha, ha. Well, it has some romcom in it. It's really it's about a single mom.

She divorced mother 46 years old. In chapter one, she drops her only child in 18 year old son off at college. And the book follows them. They're both alone on their own for the first time. And it follows them through that first year of him at college. and it follows them through that first year of him at college. So, and, you know, she has some very interesting sexual experiences. Among other things, she gets them really interested in porn.

And so, it's sort of about, like, just being an adult on your own, able to invent yourself, reinvent yourself in your 40s. And then he's doing the college thing where you're supposed to be able to reinvent yourself, but yourself in your 40s, and then he's doing the college thing where you're supposed to be able to reinvent yourself, but he's really struggling. She's almost having the college experience that he's not having. Interesting. And technology is a big piece of this. I mean, the internet is a big piece of that or no?

Yeah, yeah, totally. You know, because I do think that technology has changed the way that we think about sex in the way that we actually have sex. I was going to say, when you mentioned porn and my media thought was, okay, so there's like an internet porn habit. Because porn used to be a thing that was kind of an effort to go get. You couldn't just happen across it that easily. Now it's like, well, of course, in the midst of you're shopping for paper towels on Amazon and maybe just a quick look at PornHub to see what's going on over there. So it's much closer to the surface. No, I remember the first time I went online and looked at Porn and it was just so much

of it. It seemed to be wanting to explode from my computer because I had no idea how to deal with it. And I just thought, oh my God, Pandora's Box is open. If I had access to this when I was a teenager, what would that have been like? Because I had enough trouble just with a couple of magazines in the closet. Yeah. No, it's incredible.

Well, this is in this asylum, somewhat explored in the book, Mrs. Fletcher, which is out, when is that out? August first. August first, so pretty soon. Tom, thank you so much for doing this. I really enjoyed this conversation. You've answered many questions that I have about, that I had about the show. And this is just fascinating to think about

and definitely looking forward to the book. So thanks so much. Okay. Well, that is our show for this week. We'll be back soon with more tomorrow, and as always, I wish you and your family the very best. Though I've just been told that season one of your family has just ended, and HBO hasn't said yet whether it would renew it for season two. you