IGN’s pick for the best television series of 2015 The Leftovers , finally returns this Sunday for the debut of its third and final season. I recently sat down with Damon Lindelof -- who created the series with Tom Perrotta, who wrote the book on which the series is based -- to discuss the approach to Season 3, which will partially take place Australia (a setting that’s been established in previous seasons as having notable importance) and the decision to wrap up the critically acclaimed, yet unfortunately not widely viewed, show in Season 3.

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The Leftovers: "The Book of Kevin" Photos 9 IMAGES

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Lindelof also explains his resistance to binging TV shows and his preference that a TV episode feel like its telling its own clearly-defined story, rather than the more nebulous approach some shows take in the Netflix era of treating the entire season like a story meant to be seen in one sitting. Plus, the Lost co-creator discusses whether he'd return to broadcast TV again, now that he's wrapping up a show for HBO.I should note that quotes in this story are taken from a larger conversation I had with Lindelof that included questions regarding the events of the season premiere (the only Season 3 episode I saw before I spoke to him), so look for the second part of our interview next week.I think a couple things were going on. It’s really frustrating for me, as a viewer, when there’s a show that I’m really into and the creative visionaries behind that show say, “Well, we designed our season finale to also be a potential series finale,” because it’s sort of like, well is it an ending, or isn’t it? We also knew that when the show got picked up for a second season, it was going to be a show that was in that cult space. And at the same time, there was a show called Enlightened on HBO, with Laura Dern. [Enlighted creator] Mike White is awesome, but it was sort of like, okay, “Not a lot of people are watching this thing, but we’re bringing it back because we like it.” And then that show had just been canceled.We decided we had to approach each season of The Leftovers like [Tom] Perrotta wrote another novel and we’re just adapting that novel, because novels have endings, and they’re not designed like, for example, Hunger Games or Harry Potter, where they say there’s going to be three books or seven books. So the second season was designed to feel like it’s a novel. It has a beginning, a middle, an end. It begins with the disappearance of Evie Murphy and her friends, and we resolve that mystery and we leave our characters in a place where if that’s the last you ever see of the Garveys and the Murphys, you’d be okay with it. That said, we, as storytellers, were feeling like there was another season of the show there, we just didn’t know whether or not we’d get to tell it. So we were kind of balancing between this idea of making Season 2 feel complete, but also starting to lay some track for Season 3. And we had two ideas about where the show could potentially end. Australia felt right, because Thomas Spezialy, who came on [as a writer] in the second season, turned me on to - I had seen Picnic at Hanging Rock back when I was at film school, but The Last Wave, I don’t think I’d ever seen, so he was like, “You gotta watch these two Peter Weir movies. They’re pretty amazing and they feel like they happen in The Leftovers universe.” And they both just really stuck with me and informed the writing of Season 2. So having Kevin Garvey Sr., Scott Glenn’s character, essentially say, “I’m going off to Australia,” we kind of had this fun idea in the back of our minds that there was a spinoff show we weren’t actually shooting called The Adventures of Kevin Sr. in Australia. We would kind of get a glimpse occasionally of what’s happening there, on “International Assassin,” on Kevin’s TV screen, but if you never saw that spinoff series, you could still enjoy The Leftovers.When HBO picked the show up for a third season, it was of the mind of, “Let’s just do another season of The Leftovers.” But I kind of was starting to feel like we can’t keep doing this year by year as if it could be the last, so is it okay if this is the last season? Because there would be a lot of excitement among us as storytellers I think to just basically bring the show to a really conclusive and definitive end, and that way we could thread in idea #2 [for the ending], which is the Rapture itself, the Christian Rapture. That word never appears in the New Testament, but in all the research that Perrotta did, in writing the book, the consensus opinion is that following the rapture, there is a seven-year period of tribulation for everybody who didn’t get lifted. And so during that seven-year period of tribulation, they’re being judged, and then there’s going to be a secondary event. You have a second chance to basically go where everybody else went, and if you blow that chance, then the world ends. And I was like, “We have to set the final season of this show in basically the two weeks leading up to the seven-year anniversary of the original event. That will create really nice bookends. Let’s do that.” And HBO was like, “Great, we’re on board with that.” So the idea was that it's going to be in Australia, and that we were going to be dealing with the potential end of the world, the anticipation of the end of the world - at least in this very micro way for these characters that we care about, some of whom would believe that was going to happen, but most of whom would believe that it probably wasn’t going to happen, and that would be an interesting emotional place to do the final eight episodes.I think that when a character “dies” and comes back to life… I’m putting kind of air quotes around that, but through any lens of this show, these are the facts: Kevin drank something that he was told was poison, he was buried underground for a period of time, and he came out of the ground. Now, if you’re into sort of that Serpent and the Rainbow, Haitian [beliefs], it’s possible... It’s possible that he took some hallucinogenic drug or whatever. But then he gets shot in the chest at point blank range, and he staggers back into town and kind of recovers from that. As a huge fan of comic books, when Captain America dies, or Wolverine dies, or Iron Man dies, you kind of know they’re only temporarily dead, but it’s also sort of frustrating if they’re not brought back to life in a satisfying way. So it was really important to us all as storytellers to say Kevin just can’t get a do-over, there has to be some consequence and ramification for dying and coming back to life. And how is he holding that emotionally? And most importantly, I think we were really proud of the “International Assassin” episode, but for Kevin, it was this incredible emotional revelatory journey in which he finally kind of exorcised Patty, and she is now gone, but also, this vision quest, spiritual journey, whatever it is you want to call it, that would have a profound effect on an individual. If you have an experience like that, that’s akin to finding God. And we thought it would be kind of interesting if Kevin is not addressing any of those things. If he’s basically like, “Well, that happened, I’m just going back to life as it is.”We’re all huge Game of Thrones fans in The Leftovers writers room, so it’s like Jon Snow is dead, now Jon Snow is alive, and we’ve got White Walkers to deal with. But what is Jon Snow really thinking about his resurrection? The sort of fundamental, mythical story idea is you owe somebody for that, right? You died, you came back, now you owe something. And so I think that Kevin is basically dealing, simply put, with the idea of “I’ve never felt more alive than I did when I was having this experience when I was dead, and how do I reconcile that?” And that’s kind of where he’s starting. So it’s a textbook everything seems okay on the surface but he’s got some level of internal anxiety that needs to be resolved as a result of the story we’re telling in this final season.God is a whole other wigwam. He’s the elephant in the room and the show’s going to have to deal with that at some point, but I do think that the idea of there’s a fine line between what we’ll call the prophet’s journey and someone who is mentally ill, and I think that we’ve done a tremendous amount of exploration and education on the birth of various religions. Reza Aslan was a consultant in both Season 2 and Season 3. He’s a Biblical scholar so he’ll come into the room and we’ll ask him all kinds of questions. But one of the things that was fascinating to learn about the Quran is that the prophet Muhammad, when he first spoke to the angel Gabriel as an emissary of the law, he thought he was crazy. And it took quite a bit of time for him to convince himself otherwise. And I felt that feels like a much more human reaction to hearing voices, which is, “I’m going nuts.” You don’t go right to “Oh, God is communicating with me.” But I will say that Kevin Garvey Sr. tells Kevin in Season 2, “The voices have now stopped, I’m not receiving instructions anymore, and I’m heading off to Australia.” So we’re going to be filling in the gaps of what that was for him, and learning a little bit more about that character. What he believes the sources of those voices to be, and what it’s like when you’re hearing voices for a significant period of time and then they stop. That may be a relief but then you also miss them a little. There’s something nice about someone telling you what to do all the time, even if you’re crazy. You become a bit rudderless. So all of the above is going to be basically addressed this season.Well, we didn’t want to repeat what we did in Season 2, which is that the characters are all moving to Australia, so we wanted to find kind of a more organic way to get them to Australia, and I think that, hopefully, we did that in a surprising way. The audience knows that Kevin Garvey Sr. is in Australia, and so the most obvious way to do it is like, “My dad’s in trouble, we gotta get down there!” We didn’t do that; we did something else. By the end of the second episode, you’ll kind of know why they’re heading to Australia. But to kind of answer your question, we only got eight episodes this season --we’ve done ten in previous seasons -- so the space didn’t really exist to introduce new characters into the show the way that we had sort of introduced the Murphys last year. They ended up being really significant characters, and I felt like we had time to develop them, so you felt like you knew John Murphy and Erika Murphy and Michael Murphy, and to some degree, Evie Murphy, by the end. This year, because we had less episodes, we knew that we couldn’t really introduce new characters in any significant way -- although we’re introducing one -- and then we’re going to have to… Not everyone was going to go to Australia. And there were some logistical issues in terms of actors, because we do deals with our actors on a season by season basis, so a lot of them were committed to movies and other television projects, and we had to take that into account as we wrote the season. But we also just had to say “These are the people that we’re focusing on, these are the stories that we’re telling.” As you know, I think The Leftovers is at its best when an episode has its own identity, as opposed to just, “This is the continuing saga of The Leftovers,” and the way that we do that is that each episode focuses on just one person, or maybe just two people on the same story. When we’ve only got eight episodes, you’re not going to be able to do episodes focusing on everyone. I think by the end of the fourth episode, you’ll probably get a sense of who’s going to Australia and who’s not.Look, I’d be lying if I didn’t say, “Wouldn’t it be nice if a lot more people were watching The Leftovers,” but because a lot of people aren’t watching The Leftovers, that freed us to basically end the show after three seasons, and I think there would have been a lot of pressure, understandably, to keep the show going if it was some kind of phenom show. But more importantly, it’s not a puzzle box show. I think that even Game of Thrones, which I wouldn’t define as a puzzle box show, but there’s all kinds of theories in terms of the way the characters are interrelated in their pasts. Certainly a show like Westworld, right out of the gate, people were trying to crack it. It’s just a relief that The Leftovers is not a show that people are trying to crack. Because it’s not built on surprises and reversals and secrets that we’re keeping from the audience. There can be surprises inside the body of the show, but it’s just not… Those surprises are not revelations that the audience was supposed to guess at. So that’s just a huge relief to not be in that situation.We were all watching True Detective: Season 1 in the writers room when we were doing our Season 1, and we were having all these theories and debates about the Yellow King, and then Nic Pizzolatto is out there giving interviews saying, “Guys, don’t get so obsessed with the Yellow King! I’m just writing a relationship show between Rust and Marty.” When a show becomes a hit, it starts to attract this idea of the audience telling the show what it wants it to be, and the fact that with The Leftovers the audience is just letting the show be what it is is a tremendous relief.Yeah, I mean, we’re certainly in a day and age now... Because every episode of television is crowdsourced [online], it really only takes one individual to find a buried clue and then posit a theory that catches on and then suddenly you’re like, “Oh man, we weren’t going to reveal that until episode seven and the audience figured it out in the premiere!” So you have to be aware of that as you tell stories now, and be cognitive of the fact that the audience is kind of playing that game. Sam Esmail, I love Mr. Robot, and that’s something where a number of podcasts I’ve heard him do, he’s kind of talked about that idea - how in breaking Season 2, he was now aware that the audience is kind of trying to figure out the show piece by piece and how he, and his writers room, and the storytelling now, has to adapt to the hive mind of television watching. You never want to do tricks or gimmicks, but the audience, their default position now is, “Oh, that character that that other character is talking to is not real.” So if you watch a show like Legion, you’re basically like, “Aubrey Plaza’s not real.” So you can see Noah Hawley being like, “I know you’re thinking that, and I’m going to play with that convention, and I’m going to start shifting. She’s kind of real, but maybe she’s not who she [appears to be],” etc., etc. You kind of have to take it to the next level. I love that The Leftovers is not that show.I would never impose my storytelling mechanism on anyone else. I do feel that I’m increasingly old fashioned, and when Joss Whedon spoke out against binging, I’m really in that camp. First off, the word binge has never had a positive connotation before this. If you give me a can of potato chips, and I eat the entire can of potato chips, that’s not good. I’ll eat as many potato chips as you put in front of me. But I do think that some television shows should be absorbed with a little bit of space to process in between, even if that’s forced. And the reality is, I love The Americans. I want to see the next episode of The Americans right now. But I have to wait. And I think that delayed gratification is a wonderful thing, and that said, it’s very precious, because once The Americans has finished its season, people can watch it however they want. And now you’ve got the entire tin of potato chips, and that is how it’s been, and there are shows like Breaking Bad that started as sort of cult shows and didn’t have a lot of viewership, and because Netflix started putting the earlier seasons on, by its final run, it was a bonafide ratings phenomenon, so that’s great that you can do that. But I do feel that if you watch shows like The OA or Stranger Things, those shows are constructed knowing that they’re going to be binged, so they feel more like chapters in a story rather than “Did you like the one where…!?” and that’s totally cool that those storytellers want to do it that way. I just think there are all different kinds of stories. Harry Potter, should it have been five books? Should it have been ten books? No, it should have been seven books, because that’s what J.K. Rowling wanted it to be. Should The Hunger Games have been more than three books, considering what a massive phenomenon it was? No, Suzanne Collins somehow knew the premise will only sustain for three books, because Katniss can’t keep getting pulled into The Hunger Games. “This is the story that I want to tell.” I like making television where each episode has its own identity, and you can do concept episodes in the body of that, and I love television that does the same thing. I also love television that is heavily serialized and that is a binge-able model, and so as much as I decry bingeing, I binge, because I don’t have the restraint when I’m watching Netflix! It’s like, the next episode will start in six seconds. “Okay, I’m watching the next one!" Why wouldn’t I?I think that I’ve got an openness based on whatever the idea is to find the best home for it. That said, we made 25 hours of Lost in the first season, and I made 10 of The Leftovers in its first season, and it would be very hard for me to go back just in terms of speeding up the assembly line on that level. I think once you have more time to build a season of television, you don’t do it like bam, bam, bam, one after another. But if it was sort of like, “Oh you’re going to do thirteen episodes of the show, and that’s settled" - because now broadcast has opened its mind to a reduced episode order. American Crime for example, I think they only do 13. That’s super appealing, and I actually think it’s great that American Crime is on broadcast, because traditionally, you would think that that should be a cable show because of the subject matter that it’s dealing with, but I think it works great. And This Is Us should be a broadcast show, and certainly all those great shows on The CW, the superhero shows that Berlanti does, or Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, they feel like they should be broadcast shows.I got my start in broadcast, my first job really was on a failed Kevin Williamson show that nobody ever heard of. Then I did Nash Bridges, I did Crossing Jordan. That was four years of my life and then Lost was six years. So I worked for a decade in broadcast, and I would never turn up my nose at it, and I watch it. There are several shows I watch on broadcast, so, again, it’s whatever idea sort of floats my boat. But other than the episodic count, I think that the format of storytelling on broadcast really is dictated by commercial breaks. The idea of saying, if you’re doing an episode of The Good Place, there are going to be three commercial breaks and so there have to be two moments in the show leading into those commercial breaks where it’s like BUM BUM BUM, “What’d you say Chidi!?” They’re called act outs, and on Lost we had six, inclusive of the teaser, so basically every eight pages, something needed to happen that was a “bum bum bum!” moment.When you’re writing the show that way, that completely and totally becomes… You can’t avoid the gravity of that storytelling technique, whereas if you’re working in pay cable or streaming, you just write these one-hour little movies. And then there are shows like Mad Men, which I love, and Matt Weiner’s like, “I know there are going to be commercials, but f**k you commercials.” So Mad Men would just end at the weirdest place and then you’d go to a commercial, which I kind of love. Because Matt Weiner kind of knows that’s the way we had to watch it when it was on, but the legacy of Mad Men now... Now the way that everyone’s going to watch it, those commercials aren’t going to exist, so he’s going to tell stories however he wants to tell them.

The Leftovers: Season 3 premieres Sunday, April 16th on HBO.Eric Goldman is Executive Editor of IGN TV. You can follow him on Twitter at @TheEricGoldman , IGN at ericgoldman-ign and Facebook at Facebook.com/TheEricGoldman