“I feel like television shows should have beginnings, middles, and ends,” Lindelof said on the red carpet at the Peabody Awards on Saturday in New York. “As we were getting to the end of the second season of the show, it started feeling to all of us that these characters were closer to their end than their beginning, and just the simple laws of mathematics said if they’re closer to their end, then we probably only have one more year to go… And I’ve been monogamous with The Leftovers for the past year and a half, and I’ve never been happier or more focused on the work. But I could probably only do that for one more year and then my mind’s going to start to wander. So I need to feel like there’s an end in sight, and we’ve built this entire family together, but I really thought it would energize the team to say ‘We’re going to do this one last time.'”