http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/television/2015/10/the_leftovers_season_2_from_damon_lindelof_on_hbo_reviewed.html

The first season of HBO’s The Leftovers was like television S&M—daring, painful for its characters, painful for its audience, immensely satisfying to a particular niche. No show has ever investigated anguish, in all its permutations, so relentlessly. Damon Lindelof’s drama, based on Tom Perotta’s book of the same name, is set in a world much like ours, except 2 percent of the population vanished one Oct. 14, with no warning and no explanation. Was it the rapture? Was it the apocalypse? Was it proof of God’s existence? Proof of his indifference? Would it happen again? Every human being on Earth was left to answer these questions for him or herself, reckoning with loss in an agonizing process only marginally less excruciating for the audience.