Sharpen your pitchforks, Internet, because the guy behind Lost and Prometheus is back, and he’s spinning another mystery. Damon Lindelof has joined up with novelist and Little Children screenwriter Tom Perrotta for The Leftovers, a a new HBO series based on Perrotta’s novel of the same name. In reductive terms, it’s about the Rapture, but unlike other depictions of that mythic event, The Leftovers doesn’t explicitly state that the sudden disappearance of a portion of humanity from Earth is God’s doing. It’s like Left Behind, but without God, Kirk Cameron, or any real answers.
The show is set to debut on HBO on June 15, and so far it seems to have flown under the radar; the show’s Facebook page has a paltry 249 likes. Perhaps that’ll change now that the first teaser trailer for the show is out—although its creepy “Scientology orientation video” imagery (a snowy mountaintop, time-lapse footage of people on the street) and awkwardly phrased voiceover (“Two percent of the entire planet, of every person on it”) are more alienating than intriguing.