‘Carnivále’ at 20: It’s High Time To Dust Off This Dust Bowl Classic

Over the weekend of April 21, 2006, a mass exodus of the faithful descended on the promised land of Woodland Hills, California. A year and some change after HBO unceremoniously pulled the plug on Carnivále two seasons into a planned six-part run, fans of the cult series did what fans of cult series do, and gathered for a convention that would allow them to worship amongst fellow believers. CarnyCon featured a screening package of homemade music videos, a sleight-of-hand demonstration, tarot readings, fairground treats (popcorn, soda pop, corn dogs), photo ops with props salvaged from set, and of course, panel discussions with the cast and crew, a motley gang of under-valued character actors getting a taste of the superstar treatment. These festivities fostered a sense of concentrated community for a scattered yet ardent viewership, their enthusiasm theretofore confined to insular and hard-to-navigate chatboard sites. For those unable to attend, DVDs compiling video recordings of all the talks were burned and sent out through the mail.

Daniel Knauf’s small-screen supernatural epic set amongst a traveling carnival fits squarely into a tradition of little-seen yet well-loved oddities championed by a hardcore following, and nonetheless taken before their time. But Carnivále (Knauf threw in the superfluous accent mark for a touch of pizzazz) stands out for occupying a unique and unlucky juncture in the evolution of TV and the public obsession with it. Fortuna’s wheel, a significant recurring symbol in Knauf’s dense thicket of arcana and mythology, just wasn’t spinning in the showrunner’s favor; his grand entrée to the Golden Age of premium cable came in right before the Internet overhauled fandom and its place in the culture at large, joining disparate nerds into a more formidable market force. The show arrived tragically ahead of its moment, less in terms of ideas or style than the industry and infrastructures of taste. The same factors that once made its sprawling vision a prohibitively tough sell — mainly, a fatal overdose of universe-building lore — now make it an addictive fit for the binge-streaming model and a prime candidate for wider rediscovery. The big top is due to roll back into town.

If at all, posterity remembers Carnivále as the black sheep of HBO’s early-aughts renaissance period. Under the benevolent neglect of the not-so-benevolent CEO Chris Albrecht, era-defining classics like The Sopranos and The Wire were granted the time, money, and autonomy to flourish as they pleased. That laissez-faire doctrine agreed with the ambitious plan presented by Knauf: a 1934 period piece with state-of-the-art production values, shot entirely on location in the forbidding deserts and Dust Bowl flatlands of the West, following an ensemble to number in the dozens. At least visually, the results speak for themselves with a house aesthetic of immaculate, rustic beauty shot to emulate primitive photography techniques, the same burnished lensing that previously made O Brother, Where Art Thou? so easy on the eyes.

But from the earliest focus groups, audiences found the complex plot difficult to follow, and a yearlong hiatus between the first and second seasons didn’t help anyone keep track of continuity. Budgets ballooned, and Knauf couldn’t meet the network’s mandate to rein in costs to a still-profligate $2 million per episode. Executives laid their problem child to a premature rest, just shy of TV-on-DVD becoming a standard practice and convenient path to catch-up. The show diverged so far from the beaten path that it couldn’t fully claim the title of “critically adored, staggeringly expensive, short-lived HBO drama set in a slavishly recreated young America,” a distinction that would be ceded to the slightly more popular contemporary Deadwood.

The nail that sealed Carnivále‘s coffin was its affinity for eclectic allusion, an obscure bookishness that could leave the most dedicated acolytes feeling like they’d only gotten half of all this erudite enigma had to give. As the Emmy-winning opening credits arranged in montage, the social and political currents of the ‘30s dip in and out of a mystical framework to form allegory, which demands an uncommonly granular knowledge of both history and the occult. The opposing forces in an epochal clash between good and evil take shape in the tents of the side show and religious revivals, two roving channels of collective engagement with whatever lies beyond our mortal plane, both complicating simple Manichean morality. Methodist firebrand Brother Justin (Clancy Brown, known to some as the voice of Mr. Krabs on SpongeBob SquarePants) ministers to the despondent Okies migrating to California in droves, but his pieties mask a Satanic hunger for power echoing Father Coughlin’s heel turn to divine-right fascism. Drifter Ben Hawkins (Nick Stahl) brings a checkered past with him when he joins the circus, but he also possesses a Christlike ability to heal by draining life from another organism. He can only move the a finite supply of essence between vessels, maintaining a yin-yang balance that forbids creation and destruction alike. 

These fairgrounds charged a steep price of intellectual admission, particularly in Christian trivia about deeper-cut stuff than Jesus; it behooves a viewer to know what gnosticism is, as well as the Masonic Order, the Knights Templar, and the meaning of the many Biblical locations lending their names to the stops on the trail. Though at the same time, one can still appreciate that somewhere like New Canaan, California, foretells a great reckoning even if they’re unfamiliar with the not-new Canaan as the promised land for the nomadic Israelites. The opening titles throw out Big Ideas like fistfuls of breadcrumbs, hopscotching between tarot-card omens and early-twentieth-century happenings like Jesse Owens’ Olympic victory, the unsavory doings of the Klan, the rise of swing dancing, and Babe Ruth’s famed home run call. (A miracle if ever there was one.) I’m still not sure I have gleaned every subtle intricacy it has to offer.

Not that that has hindered my enjoyment, or should do so for anyone else’s. Among the many elements that Knauf borrowed from Twin Peaks — a fascination with how wickedness moves through the world, the Badalamentian musical cues, the magnetic three-foot-something star Michael J. Anderson — was the notion that comprehension and understanding aren’t quite the same thing. As the carnies have learned to, a viewer comes to accept the mystery rather than butting their head up against confusion. That leaves so many rewards to reap from a series in a genre of its own; a single episode might vacillate between romance, soap opera, fantasy, and bloodcurdling flashes of unearthly horror. Each hour contains at least one moment of skin-tingling transcendence, starting with a rain of blood that gives the pilot its showstopping set piece.

Through it all, the cast of characters make up a vibrant narrative tapestry more than enough to sustain interest through 24 episodes, fondnesses quickly developing for the sinister-or-is-he mentalist Lodz and his lover Lila the Bearded Lady, the catty bon-mot-dropping lizard man, the psychotic disciple of Brother Justin played by a oddly alluring John Carroll Lynch. The impaired roustabout Jonesy (Tim DeKay) gets caught between two girls with difficult families: Clea DuVall’s Sofia, who can hear the voice of her mute seer mother in her brain (what women in her twenties can’t relate?), and Carlo Gallo’s Libby, who “dances the cooch” with her mother and manager father in an mini-melodrama with a soupcon of Freudian tension.

And within today’s structures of deep-dive, fine-toothed fan engagement, even the most initially alienating aspects of the show no longer need overlooking. The same pathologies that generate wild-eyed conspiracy theories about the hidden profundities of Watchmen or what’s going to happen on Westworld next week would have a field day with Carnivále, which provides an infinite reserve of grist for yarn-and-corkboard analysis. Social media would have agreed with the show, allowing the enthusiastic exchanges between diehards to take place in full view of the online commentariat, instead of a small convention hall in the hinterlands of LA. Connecting the geeks biting the heads off of chickens to the geeks of the mouth-breathing variety soon to inherit the earth, the show just missed the ascendance of Comic-Con, which bestowed a mainstream pull on the whims of the uncool. 

It’s poetically apt that this meditation on the sacred, inviolable equilibrium of the universe would take leave of us just as a successor would arrive. Lost premiered in 2004, smack in the middle of Carnivále’s year-plus interseason break, and ran away with the zeitgeist. The show altered the course of J.J. Abrams and Damon Lindelof’s careers, and terraformed the face of fandom forever, just too late for its not-so-impenetrable peer. But if there’s any metaphysical takeaway from Knauf’s odyssey through the soul of America, it’s that nothing ever ends, only releasing energy that swirls in the aether until it can reconstitute itself in a new shape. Carnivále has lain dormant, gathering its eldritch powers, for long enough. 

Charles Bramesco (@intothecrevassse) is a film and television critic living in Brooklyn. In addition to Decider, his work has also appeared in the New York Times, the Guardian, Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair, Newsweek, Nylon, Vulture, The A.V. Club, Vox, and plenty of other semi-reputable publications. His favorite film is Boogie Nights.