The third and final series of critically acclaimed HBO drama The Leftovers will be made in Australia, it has been confirmed.
Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews, who is in the US on a trade mission, announced the news that the show would film in his state at Warner Bros studios in Los Angeles on Saturday, claiming the "Hollywood coup" would bring $20 million of production expenditure and create more than 250 local jobs.
The Leftovers will be filmed in and around Melbourne over the next three months. Regular cast members Justin Theroux, Christopher Eccleston, Liv Tyler and Janel Moloney are expected to join the production in Victoria. 
The cable TV series, which airs in Australia on Showcase, is based on a novel by Tom Perrotta and was developed for television by Lost co-creator Damon Lindelof.
It follows a small community as they deal with the aftermath of the disappearance of 140 million people - 2 per cent of the world's population - in a "Rapture-like event" that happened three years prior to the show's beginning.
The news that at least some of the 10-episode final season would be shot in Australia does not come as a complete surprise, as trade papers reported in   April that the show's narrative arc made a move to Australia all but certain.
The choice of Victoria, though, was not so easily predicted.
The seeds of an Australian storyline were sown in season two, when the father of lead character Kevin Garvey (Justin Theroux) announced he was heading Down Under. "I could sit around and cry about how the world f---ing ended, or I could start it up again," Kevin Sr (Scott Glenn) told his son before heading to Perth.
Justin Theroux as police officer Kevin Garvey, whose family is at the heart of The Leftovers.
Melbourne is more used to being cast as a good place for the world to end rather than to begin anew; Ava Gardner reportedly said as much while making nuclear fallout drama On the Beach here in 1958, even if the "quote" was in fact revealed many years later to have been the joking invention of former Age journalist Neil Jillett.
The city also served as the backdrop for the End Days in the Nicolas Cage film Knowing in 2009, though it doubled as Boston in that film.
Victoria has largely missed out on the major Hollywood film productions that have opted instead for the Gold Coast or Fox Studios in Sydney, but it is doing better on the television front. Last year it hosted two American science-fiction series, Childhood's End and Hunters. Both were made for the Syfy cable network; the latter boasted Gale Anne-Hurd, of Terminator and The Walking Dead fame, as executive producer.
Christopher Eccleston as preacher Matt Jamison.
Though it is not a major ratings performer, The Leftovers has won the critics over, but how it wraps things up will be crucial.
Lindelof and his co-writers were widely vilified for the hugely unsatisfying way they ended Lost after six seasons, but he told The Hollywood Reporter last   December that he intended "to bring The Leftovers to a definitive end".
But he added, a little ominously, "by 'definitive,' we mean 'wildly ambiguous but hopefully mega-emotional,' as all things related to this show are destined to be".
Karl Quinn is on Facebook and on twitter @karlkwin