Carnivale (redux)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QwtMpL-zxEY

During its short run (2003-2005), I was completely hooked on Daniel Knauf's Carnivale, despite its end-of-days hokum and endlessly evolving mythology.

Set during the Great Depression, the story told of a ragtag roving circus traveling through the dusty Southwest, unwittingly on its way to a showdown between agents of goodness and wickedness.

Sweat, dust and dirt, sweltering heat and blinding wind storms filled the screen weekly. I loved the feel of the show. Carnivale won Emmys for its production values but was overlooked for performance awards. Maybe the size of the cast worked against them.

Michael J. Anderson played the diminutive leader of the band, Samson, a former weightlifting dwarf who answered to the mysterious (hell, everything about this show was mysterious) Management, who sat shrouded in a trailer, visited only by Samson and one or two others.

Nick Stahl as escaped prisoner Ben Hawkins and Clancy Brown as evangelist Brother Justin were the incarnations of light and darkness, although it was never clear who was which. That question and a host of other puzzlers made the show intriguing but also frustrating to those who really like narratives to have definitive meaning.

Though it lasted only two seasons -- to the great disappointment of its fans -- it was a bit of a game changer, at least to me, in how it handled themes of faith and morality. (See especially the season 1 episode titled Babylon) Criminality and lasciviousness were written on every page, judgment meted out with relish, but Knauf and company seemed interested in the grayness of human existence not dogma. This notion is present in the series' opening monologue, delivered by Anderson.

The series is grim and because it was cancelled prematurely leaves many loose threads dangling but it is a fascinating treatment of the duality of human beings, as we struggle with right and wrong along unfamiliar paths, into uncertain futures.