HBO's 'The Leftovers' Renewed For Third & Final Season – TVWise

HBO is bringing back The Leftovers one last time. The premium cable network has renewed the critically acclaimed drama series from Damon Lindelof and Tom Perrotta for a third and final season, TVWise has learned. There’s no official word on the size of the order for the final season, though it is expected to be for ten episodes.
Created by Damon Lindelof and Tom Perrotta, The Leftovers is set just after the apocalypse. When the Rapture happened, but not quite like it’s supposed to. The series tells the story of the people who didn’t make the cut and a world that will never be the same. The drama series stars Justin Theroux, Amy Brenneman, Christopher Eccleston, Liv Tyler, Carrie Coon, Ann Dowd, Margaret Qualley, Chris Zylka, Regina King, Kevin Carroll, Jovan Adepo and Janel Moloney.
The show’s second season saw something of a major change with the series relocating from New York to a small town in Eastern Texas, which inexplicably was left untouched by the apocalypse that wiped out 2% of the earth’s population. This is the setting for a tale of two families: the Garveys, whose lives were forever changed by The Departure, and have since moved to this special place, and the Murphys, a local family who seems to have been spared from an event that shook the rest of the world.
“It is with great enthusiasm that we welcome back Damon Lindelof, Tom Perrotta and the extraordinary talent behind The Leftover for its third and final season,” said Mike Lombardo, President of HBO Programming. “This show has proven to be one of the most distinctive HBO series and we are extremely proud of its unrivaled originality, which has resulted in such a passionate following by our HBO viewers. We admire and fully support Damon’s artistic vision and respect his decision to bring the show to its conclusion next season.”
The Leftovers enjoys very strong support amongst HBO’s executive team and has been almost universally praised since it debuted last June. That strong support and critical acclaim has not translated into strong ratings, however, with both seasons of the show suffering from weak viewership figures. The first season averaged a live+same day audience of 1.6 million viewers; while the second season, which only just wrapped its run, suffered a fairly steep audience decline, managing an average audience of only 0.7 million viewers.
“I have never, ever experienced the level of creative support and trust that I have received from HBO during the last two seasons of The Leftovers. Tom, myself and our incredible team of writers and producers put tremendous care into designing those seasons as novels unto themselves…with beginnings, middles and ends”, said Damian Lindelof. “As we finished our most recent season, it became clear to us that the series as a whole was following the same model…and with our beginning and middle complete, the most exciting thing for us as storytellers would be to bring The Leftover to a definitive end.
“And by ‘definitive,’ we mean ‘wildly ambiguous but hopefully mega-emotional,’ as all things related to this show are destined to be”, he continued. On behalf of our incredible crew and superb cast, we are all tremendously grateful that HBO is giving us an opportunity to conclude the show on our own terms…an opportunity like this one rarely comes along, and we have every intention of living up to it. One more thing. We are blessed by the unwavering support of our fans and the incredibly powerful voice of the critical community. We feel absolutely privileged to heat up one last helping of leftovers.”