The game is being changed for the second season of HBO‘s "The Leftovers." The show is getting a shakeup for the next go round, dumping some cast members, and relocating the setting from upstate New York to Texas. Justin Theroux, Amy Brenneman, Chris Zylka, Margaret Qualley, Christopher Eccleston, and Carrie Coon are returning, but what isn’t clear is what kind of story will be told. While executive producer Damon Lindelof doesn’t spill those details, he does share an interesting parallel to one of the great shows television has ever produced.
"Although some people think the second season for ‘The Wire‘ is its least successful, I was just completely and totally captivated by the audacity and boldness of just shifting the storytelling down to the docks, and taking the characters who I had become deeply enamored of and sidelining them in favor of entirely new characters," Lindelof told Collider. "In my mind, it paid off huge because it set up the paradigm for what the third season and the fourth season of ‘The Wire’ could be, not to mention the fifth season. So, I’ve always felt that the next logical season of ‘The Leftovers’ would just be the continuing adventures of these people in this place. Let’s not do that. Let’s try something different."
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It’s an interesting approach, certainly, with the writer admitting the first season of the show exhausted almost all the material from Tom Perrotta‘s source novel. Whether or not this shift will be successful remains to be seen, but you have to admire Lindelof’s willingness to put it all on the line. "…I do feel like the catalyst for coming back was ‘let’s try something bold!’ And if it doesn’t work, well, it will be a spectacular failure as opposed to a humdrum one," he said.
There’s no exact launch date for the new season of "The Leftovers," but filming is underway, and Lindelof says it should arrive this fall.