This is probably the worst show to write about using this arbitrary time limit I’ve given for myself. Hey guys, there’s this really amazing show on Sundance that’s meditative and reflective, and I’m going to compress the experience of watching it into a writeup that takes less time than your average drive-thru trip. It’s a disservice to the show to try and be so off-the-cuff about it, but it’s not like I’ve had better luck talking about it after deliberating greatly on its worldview and merits. The little blurb I wrote about it for last year’s Top 10 Shows list was the hardest to generate, as the show is a bit like that physics principle about interacting with an event changing its properties.

Now I’m at the risk of hyperbolizing it too much, so maybe just read Matt Zoller Seitz’s review for the Season 2 premiere over here to get what is is that makes the show so appealing, and hard to write about. As for the premiere: I thought it was a somewhat weak installment for the show, which is typical of many follow-ups to the climactic finales of the year previous. The fallout from Daniel’s assault (that’s as big as the show goes: a guy gets beaten up, and it feels like the end of the world) gives us plenty of time to get reacquainted with the people of Polly, Georgia, and play a bit of catchup as to where they are emotionally.

It plays a bit like busywork at times, which is unlike the show. Much as I was happy to see Amantha, Tawney, and even Ted Jr. again, there’s almost a surfeit of plot (by the show’s standards) to get through in order to set things up for the next 9 episodes. Of the plots, Sherriff Daggett investigating Daniel’s attack is the most engaging so far, as it’s the most connected to the characters we care about. For now, I’d rather the senator, Bobby Dean and the other good ol’ boys stay in the background, and the focus remain on the Holden family and Daniel.

When the show does that, as the premiere does in the opening and closing scenes, the show becomes hard to describe as anything other than transcendental. Rectify is a show that grapples with faith in ways that are unlike anything else on TV. Even shows I love, like Hannibal, use existential questions as a means of heightening the drama behind the plot. Here, the spectrum of beliefs these characters provide is organically drawn from everyday ways of in which people find themselves asking the big questions. Daniel’s dreamlike-state for the premiere lets Rectify foreground its struggles with the unknown more than usual, and it’s not cheating: the show has earned the weight of its inquiries, and both the pace and method in which it wants to explore them. The six episodes we got last year would have been enough to make Rectify something special, but it’s my hope that series-creator Ray McKinnon was just getting started.