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Through a combination of shrewd marketing and high-quality
programming, HBO has turned their Sunday night line-up into appointment television –
even though there is no regular line-up to speak of. Instead, original series are rotated
in and out of the schedule in abbreviated seasons lasting no more than thirteen weeks.
Established favorites like The Sopranos and
Sex and the City have served as
successful lead-ins, luring large audiences to newer fare like Six Feet Under and Curb Your Enthusiasm.
It’s a successful strategy and for many viewers, tuning to HBO on Sunday night is an
automatic response regardless of what’s currently on the schedule.
Filling the gap between the recently completed second season of The
Wire and the upcoming fifth season of The Sopranos is Carnivale, a new
hour-long drama from writer-producer Daniel Knauf (Wolf Lake). Whereas most HBO
dramas tend to focus on contemporary society as reflected through one institution or
another (prison on Oz, organized crime on The Sopranos, law enforcement,
drug rings and unions on The Wire), Carnivale is a big canvas tale of good
and evil set against the backdrop of the Depression.
In the Oklahoma dustbowl of 1934, fugitive Ben Hawkins (Nick Stahl) has
barely begun burying his recently deceased mother when a man from the bank arrives in a
bulldozer to demolish the family homestead. With no other prospects, Ben hitches a ride
with a traveling carnival that happens to be passing through. Samson (Michael J.
Anderson), a dwarf who runs the show, receives word from the shadowy Management that Ben
is someone to keep an eye on. Ben, on the other hand, is less than enamored of the
collection of freaks he finds himself surrounded by, including Lila the Bearded Lady,
Gecko the Lizard Man and Siamese twins Alexandria and Caladonia.
Meanwhile, in California’s Central Valley, Brother Justin Crowe
(Clancy Brown) presides over his flock, some of whom are displeased when he welcomes the
Okies who have poured into the area. Brother Justin has begun having visions, including an
unseasonable snowfall and a woman vomiting up coins.
In an interview on the HBO website, Knauf describes the show as "The
Grapes of Wrath meets David Lynch," which is as good a shorthand description as
any. Lynchisms are evident everywhere, from the casting of Michael J. Anderson (forever to
be best known as the dancing dwarf from Twin Peaks) to the deliberate dreamlike
pacing to the surreal flashbacks and hallucinations.
The show’s pilot episode, "Milfay", is rich with period
atmosphere; with its parched landscapes and lurid carnival setting, it looks unlike
anything else on television. The episode is laden with portents of doom and vague hints of
revelations to come. Ben is plagued with nightmares that suggest a troubled past and by
the end of the first hour it becomes apparent that he possesses supernatural gifts.
Since HBO provided only this first episode for review, it is difficult
to say whether the series will turn out as well as the rest of the Sunday night stable.
Like the network’s other hour-long dramas, there’s a strong serial element to
the show – the sense of a novelistic story slowly unfolding. For example, while The
Wire is by far the best series of 2003, it would be impossible to tell this from
watching a single episode; it’s the accumulation of detail that makes it so
compelling.
Carnivale has an intriguing set-up, but it’s the sort of
larger-than-life allegory that could easily bog down in subsequent episodes. As the second
season of Twin Peaks proved, there are only so many dreams, hallucinations and
harbingers of the apocalypse that viewers will put up with before demanding that something
actually happen. Carnivale gets your attention, but it remains to be seen whether
it can hold it.
-
Scott Von Doviak
