Yes, between ratings-grabbing soaps, murder mysteries and violent fantasies from Game Of Thrones to The Walking Dead, people have been dying on the small screen for years. Shows from Six Feet Under to Pushing Daisies, Dead Like Me and more have used death as the jumping-off point for family and investigative drama. But this current crop isn’t interested in using death simply as a dramatic engine or gory shock tactic; they’re fascinated by the thing itself. The fantastical stories they tell don’t just portray characters attempting to cope with the abrupt blank space left behind by death, they’re attempts to cope with and understand it in their own right.

Take HBO’s The Leftovers, which comes adapted from the 2011 Tom Perrotta novel of the same name and premieres in the US this June. It presupposes that three years ago, two percent of the world’s population disappeared, all at the same time, all without warning. Taking the inhabitants of a small New York state town as its focus, The Leftovers concerns itself with the titular people left behind and their varying responses to the loss. Some lose faith, others gain it. Some pull away from their remaining family, others draw closer. Extravagant belief structures are erected in the post-event world, some groups decrying humankind’s sin and others preaching hedonism. However insistent the dogma though, nobody has the answer. Whatever they believe, nobody knows where the disappeared went, or why.

As well as making some insightful points about religious rhetoric, Perrotta’s premise performs a simple but powerful narrative trick by expressing the bewilderment of a single bereavement on a global scale. By expanding the personal shock of an abrupt death from one to millions, his novel explores the myriad ways grief disarms you. Whenever someone we know and love dies, we’re the leftovers, mystified, answerless and struggling to continue in a disinterested universe. If the HBO series captures even some of the novel’s clarity on grief, it’ll be well worth the investment of our time.

Similarly worth the investment is stylish French series The Returned, a drama that could trade on its dreamily constructed atmosphere alone were its characters and plots not every bit as captivating.

Once again focusing on the inhabitants of a small town, The Returned imagines how we would react were our dead loved ones sent back to us unharmed and with no knowledge of where they’d been. Through its increasingly complex supernatural mystery it stages simple human truths. The difficulties, for instance, of parents raising one child after losing another; the necessity of leaving our past – handsome ex-fiancés and all – behind us; the cruel and difficult-to-swallow truth that sometimes we’re better off without the family members who’ve died… The Returned’s fantastical stories of Camille, Adèle and Serge respectively explore the real-world emotional tangles to which death gives rise.