A meditation on grief, anger, survival, loss, and madness — it's safe to say that there's never been anything on television like The Leftovers. Tom Perrotta's 2011 novel of the same name examined the aftermath of the disappearance of 2% of the world's population through characters in a small New York town; Perrotta and Damon Lindelof (Lost) co-created The Leftovers for HBO, and its first season aired last year. For some critics and viewers, the show was just too sad — "grim" and "grimness" were a frequent criticism.

It had its champions, too, of course. And those who stuck with the show through its first 10 episodes were rewarded with an unprecedented emotional experience. Also, yes: even some hope for these characters' futures. Justin Theroux, Carrie Coon, Amy Brenneman, Liv Tyler, Christopher Eccleston, Margaret Qualley, and Chris Zylka led the cast in its first season, and they will all be back in its second, though The Leftovers' center will move from Mapleton, New York, to Miracle, Texas — a town that claims to have lost no one in The Sudden Departure. Miracle, therefore, is a place where Kevin Garvey (Theroux), his daughter, Jill (Qualley), and his girlfriend, Nora Durst (Coon), along with their new adopted baby, will seek safety. And there, the Garvey-Dursts will meet the Murphy family (led by Regina King and Kevin Carroll), who clearly have their own secrets.

BuzzFeed News talked with Lindelof and Theroux, who had to leave to go to a press conference about two-thirds of the way through the conversation, about The Leftovers' new location and characters, why Lindelof almost thought one season was enough, and for Theroux, why working with Lindelof reminds him of working with David Lynch.

Oh, and — why the hell Ann Dowd is back on the show when her character, Patti Levin, the leader of the Guilty Remnant, is dead!

Justin, what was your reaction when Damon told you the show was going to mostly move from Mapleton to Miracle?

Justin Theroux: My first reaction was "Yay!" because we're going to get out of the places we were shooting in Queens. It did start to feel in the first season that it became kind of oppressively small in that town. And it felt like it was kind of shot out in a way. Obviously, at the end of the first season, Kevin had gotten his wish.

Most shows don't blow themselves up in between the first and second seasons. Could there have been a scenario where everybody stayed in Mapleton?

Damon Lindelof: Absolutely. That was the default position. And this was a very unique experience for me, largely because it was an adaptation. And working with Tom and saying, like, All the things that make this a good novel — in my opinion, a beautiful novel — run sort of counterintuitive to making it an ongoing television series. So how do we take that idea: This actually kind of feels like it's over.

Let's start to talk about what life looks like in Mapleton a week or a year or five years later in the way that, you know, most television dramas would continue, whether it's Desperate Housewives or Friday Night Lights or even Lost. And we started to talk about that, and I started feeling just like, You know what? Maybe we're done. Maybe there shouldn't be a second season of The Leftovers. This is just feeling like we're continuing for a continuation's sake.

And most importantly, what do the characters want? Because in the finale of the first season, all of them are sort of articulating this desire to stop feeling shitty. So what are they going to do about it? What if there is this kind of kitschy town that claims that nobody was departed from there? It's a town of like 400 people, and it's not really that amazing. And then we started talking about what it would be like to live in that place.

And then it was like, What if the Garveys moved there? That seems like it's not just a gimmick, like that's a place that they would gravitate towards. They wouldn't say they were moving there because it was magical, but that's exactly why they're moving there. And it started opening up, and I started getting excited creatively.

JT: There's kind of a — not a separate belief system for the people that live there, but there is a kind of disease of uniqueness. They have their own brand of why they were spared, or why they were special, or what Miracle is. So it was cool just from an audience standpoint to watch those people, and a character standpoint to interact with them. Because the Garveys bring their own set of problems with them.

DL: Yeah, I think that the story that the show wants to tell is that The Sudden Departure is a scapegoat. It's this excuse for people to behave the way that they wanted to behave before it happened. So this idea that Episode 9 in the first season was really all about showing that the Garveys were very fucked up prior to The Departure. And I think that the show is very interested in telling that story now again in Miracle — the best place to tell that story is a place where The Departure didn't happen at all. Sort of like, Are families still fucked up? Yes, they are.