somebody made that up

The best show on TV comes back tomorrow night on The Sundance Channel, to start its third season. Almost nobody is watching it.

Rectify was created by Ray McKinnon, best known as a character actor who played the reverend in Deadwood, Holly Hunter's suitor in O Brother Where Art Thou, and a handful of other things. He also won an Academy Award, shared with his late wife Lisa Blount and producing partner Walton Goggins (Boyd Crowder on Justified), for their 2001 short film The Accountant. The Bitter Southerner recently posted a great feature on him and on the southernness of Rectify.

Rectify is full of faces almost as familiar as McKinnon's -- Michael O'Neill from The West Wing, Sean Bridgers from Deadwood, J. Smith-Cameron from a lengthy career on stage and screen, including the excellent Margaret -- though it's not the kind of character actor grab bag that something like The Good Wife is. Everyone feels hand-picked for the part -- like it was just a matter of the right show coming along that would shine a spotlight on them. I have my favorites -- even for an overlooked show, I think it's insane Abigail Spencer doesn't have an Emmy nomination -- but there's no one in the cast who doesn't deliver a masterpiece performance at some point in the show's first two seasons.

At the center of it is Aden Young, who plays Daniel Holden.

In the first episode, Daniel is released from prison, where he's been on death row for 19 years -- half his life -- having been convicted of the rape and murder of his high school girlfriend. DNA evidence has now shown he's not the rapist, and the state has to decide whether or not to try him again or drop their case against him.

Daniel is quiet, thoughtful, deliberate in his movements, and -- especially at first -- easily overwhelmed. His adult life has been spent in confinement under constant surveillance. He's returning to the same small town he grew up in, where his father is dead, his mother is remarried, and he now has a stepbrother positioned to take over the family business and a teenage half-brother to whom he's a stranger. His sister Amantha (Spencer) has devoted her life to fighting for his release, working with (and in a relationship with) the lawyer from Daniel's appeal, an advocate from the Innocence Project.

What is Rectify about, though?

It's not about solving the murder of who killed Hanna. That doesn't mean that question isn't addressed or answered, but that it's not what. the show. is about. It's not structured like the "an innocent man has been released from prison - what happens next?" show that most people and all network execs would be imagining at this point in hearing about Rectify. It's not a mystery.


I'm sure there's a thinkpiece out there that sums things up succinctly, but Rectify is about a lot of things. It's about what happens next. It's about Daniel getting used to being out. It's about what it was like for him being in. It's about his family adjusting to him being out - to not quite knowing him the way they did, not knowing how he fits in with them, and in the case of his half-brother and his step-brother's wife, getting to know him for the first time.

It's about the uncertainty: Daniel doesn't remember what happened, so is he even innocent? It's about how the community reacts to Daniel being released when no alternate suspect has been named, and how that affects the state senator who had been Daniel's prosecutor, the new district attorney, the new sheriff, Hanna's family, and the witnesses who testified that they saw Daniel do it.

It's not a mystery except that of course it is, because anything that deals decently and honestly with its portrayal of people deals in mystery.

It may sound somber or bleak, but it can be surreal, it can be funny, it can be touching, it can be uplifting.

It's not just that it's the best show on TV. It's the only show like it on TV. I can't say "if you like ___, you'll love Rectify," because while Rectify is doing something better than anyone else, most of the toys it plays with have not left the box before. Like The Sopranos or The Wire, it's not doing the TV people have done before. It's doing something else.

You want to start at the beginning, so find it on Netflix or watch one of the marathons.