Leftovers in the Time of COVID: A Pandemic and the Retextualization of an HBO Series

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Acknowledgments

Dr. Ethan Tussey provided helpful feedback on an earlier draft of this paper.

Disclosure statement

The author declares that there is no conflict of interest.

Notes

1 The Leftovers, season 3, episode 8, “The Book of Nora.”

2 Arguably, binge watching has its televisual origins in the arrival of home video box sets collecting television series, which allowed viewers to watch more episodes in one sitting than were broadcast, combined with cable channels running “marathons” of particular series, wherein a given network would devote hours and hours of consecutive broadcasting to reruns of a television series.

3 Horeck, Jenner, and Kendall (2018). Referring to the dominant model of streaming program introduced by Netflix, the authors describe how an “insular flow” is produced: “Rather than going back to the home page and making a deliberate choice […] the post-play function takes us directly to the next episode. The ‘skip intro’ function even allows us to make the narrative flow feel more seamless.”

4 “Eschatology,” Oxford English Dictionary.

5 The Leftovers, season 1, episode 1, “Pilot.”

6 The Leftovers, season 3, episode 8, “The Book of Nora.”

7 Ibid.

8 The Leftovers, season 3, episode 8, “The Book of Nora.”

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Seth Wilder

S. A. Wilder is a doctoral student in Moving Image Studies in the School of Film, Media, and Theater at Georgia State University, focused principally on historiography, global cinemas, and esthetics and their relationship to the auteur concept. His work has appeared in Porn Studies, Asian Cinema Journal, and the edited volume Screening Controversy (forthcoming).