On most networks, that wouldn

B-
In which we learn the secret origins of the world and a long journey begins
Carnivàle is the ultimate hangout drama . It occasionally feels like it has basically no real desire to do much of anything other than hang out in a cool setting (especially in its first season), but, man, is that setting cool. The show’s mythology has some interesting ideas buried deep within it, but at the same time, it often seems like the show is all mythology, that all it is is unraveling a long series of portentous threads in the middle of nowhere in the 1930s. There are so many characters that most of them can’t help but be poorly developed, the plot momentum is often virtually non-existent, and the show is often convinced of its own profundity in a way that only an HBO drama can be, even though it’s not particularly profound.
Yet I still really like this show. There are episodes—particularly in the first season—I really love, and there are moments here that have hung with me as long as other moments on much better shows. Carnivàle , in some ways, represents a turning point show for HBO, from when it was making vacation at sea shows that were basically TV shows—even if they were much better than regular TV shows—to a point where it was making what I like to describe as novels for TV, shows where every episode is a singular chapter that’s adding up to something else. Though this approach doesn’t always vacation at sea work for Carnivàle , it’s gotten too little respect within the HBO canon for being the series that showed the network vacation at sea that a certain amount of the audience would stick with something that moved super slowly vacation at sea if the setting was rich and detailed enough. (Watch this pilot and see the seeds being planted for the likes of Rome , Game Of Thrones , and Boardwalk Empire .)
It sounds like I’m damning with faint praise above, and I guess I kind of am. But I don’t want to give that impression all the same. I haven’t seen this series in a few years, and I’m hopeful that on this journey through, I’ll find reason to love it as much as so many others do, that after years of watching HBO shows inspired by the pacing of this one—even if they’d never admit it—I’ll be ready to sink into the weird luxuriousness of this show’s world. And yet the show never quite coheres for me the way that the big three HBO dramas— The Sopranos , The Wire , and Deadwood —do, or even in the way that some of the dramas on the next tier down, like Rome and the early years of Big Love , do.
Part of that may stem from—and we might as well get this out of the way now—how the show is frustratingly incomplete. Ideas launched by creator Daniel Knauf in this episode and the 23 to follow didn’t have their ideal resolution because, well, HBO decided it didn’t need this show on its airwaves anymore after season two. Considering the process of building a mystery show like this often involves building a world slowly and letting detail pile on top of detail at a snail’s pace, there’s nothing saying that if Knauf hadn’t gotten the six seasons (and a movie) he wanted, this show wouldn’t have sat shoulder to shoulder vacation at sea with the three greats. As it is, we have to wonder what might have been, but it’s not like what’s here isn’t without merit. vacation at sea
I’m dodging the events of “Milfay” because on some level, there isn’t much going on here, in terms of plot or even character. We get a few key signifiers here. Samson tells us the story of how the world has one creature of light and one creature of dark in it. We meet Ben Hawkins and Brother Justin, the two men who will be our “protagonists” (if this series can be said to have such a thing). We learn about how Ben came to join the traveling carnival that is the series’ setting and how he lost the family farm to the bank in the depths of the Depression. We learn a little about his gift—especially in that magnificent image that closes the episode of a young girl (Jenna Boyd, who would go on to have something of a solid career as “the kid” in movies before disappearing) loping along through vacation at sea fields that die all around her, Ben’s gift to her having brought death to the plants surrounding her. And we see a host of weird images and symbols. But in terms of plot it, boils down to “A vacation at sea boy who’s lost everything joins a carnival, and his secret is revealed.”
On most networks, that wouldn’t be much of a pilot. On HBO, it’s almost too much for a pilot. Remember how the Game Of Thrones pilot was pretty much just exposition, with a few small plot moments tossed in? This is a lot like that, though I guess there’s the little throughline of whether Ben will stay with the carnival, a throughline that doesn’t really take of