‘The Path’: Can This Show Be Saved?

How do we get The Path back on track?

Created by Jessica Goldberg, Hulu’s original series about a small cult with increasingly malign leadership boasted a highly pedigreed cast (Breaking Bad’s Aaron Paul, Hannibal’s Hugh Dancy, and True Detective’s Michelle Monaghan) and a storyline that several high-profile Scientology exposes primed audiences for. Its first season didn’t light the world on fire, but the combination of performers and premise made it worth watching.

Then along came Season Two. With Aaron Paul’s nonbeliever character Eddie out of the cult and Dancy’s murderous Cal Roberts in charge, this should be where it really gets good. Instead, its first four episodes (the fifth debuts tomorrow) have been marked with conflicts that come out of nowhere and go nowhere in turn, increasingly shouty performances, non-starter mysteries, and an overall sense that the show is just killing time.

Based on recent experience, a series that, well, wanders off the path (sorry) with just one season under its belt, as The Path has done, is unlikely to get back on track. Thinking back over comparable series, Showtime’s Masters of Sex suffered from a similar decline. Its first season was solid if unspectacular work from a talented cast in a specific and unusual milieu, much like Season One of The Path (albeit with the added advantage of being pretty sexy stuff). But as time passed, the series slowly but steadily abandoned the alluring basic premise — Masters and Johnson both studying sex and having a whole bunch of it themselves — that distinguished it in the first place. Perhaps the writers grew tired of the set-up. Perhaps the thinking was that there were only so many variations on people watching other people fuck that they could go through before viewers tired of it. (To which I can only say “Are you familiar with the Internet?”, but be that as it may).

Whatever the case, Masters’ drop-off in quality was startling. Starting with in Season Two, the show devolved into a second-rate Mad Men, alternating clunky takes on the social mores of the day with dull familial drama. And it shared with The Path a tendency to meaninglessly ratchet up tension and shuttle characters from place to place in order to fill up airtime, a surefire sign of a show spinning its creative wheels.

Elsewhere, there’s Showtime’s Homeland. Granted, the Claire Danes espionage thriller got a lot more attention than either The Path or Masters during its Emmy and Peabody Award–winning first season. But network executives’ misguided decision to force the producers to keep [CHARACTER REDACTED] alive, contrary to the show’s original intentions, quickly undermined the show’s strengths. The second season coasted on the fumes of the first season’s good will for a strong episode here and there before taking an irrevocable turn for the absurd by the end; it’s spent the many seasons since as 24’s ever so slightly less racist upscale cousin. More recently, UnREAL, Lifetime’s behind-the-scenes dramedy about a reality-TV dating-competition show, racked up rapturous reviews during its debut season, only to experience what may well have been the most complete reversal of critical fortune this side of True Detective the following year.

Compare this pattern to The Leftovers, Halt and Catch Fire, or The Americans, three shows with competent-to-spotty first seasons that wound up showing more promise toward the end and basically shot straight into the stratosphere when they returned for a second go-round. That trajectory is an indication of a creative staff becoming more self-assured and discovering its collective voice. Or compare it to, I dunno, any show you care to name that had several strong seasons, a clunker or two, and then rebounded — your basic pattern of creative ups and downs when you start from a place of strength. By contrast, Masters and The Path had good-but-not-great first seasons and seemed to collapse immediately afterwards, suggesting that the creators didn’t have a full battery to begin with and are now almost entirely out of juice

So it’s not promising.

That said, could it conceivably get back on track? I think so. And as Doctor Steven Meyer himself might have done, I’ve come up with an eight-step program to do it. Is it armchair showrunning? Sure. But what good is a cult if you can’t exercise your iron will?

STEP ONE: GIVE US A VILLAIN

It’s well past time for The Path to give up all this vacillating back-and-forth with jittery cult leader Cal Roberts and have him commit to being the Meyerists’ David Miscavige. His slow, two-steps-forward one-step-back zig-zag approach to that point has not been half as interesting as the writers likely hoped; just end it and make him the crimelord already. Don’t worry, you can still show his inner conflict without jerking him all over the map. Breaking Bad, The Sopranos, and endless other shows with (to put it mildly) deeply flawed men in positions of leadership.

STEP TWO: GIVE HIM A FOIL

In theory, Cal already has this in the form of Sarah, his co-leader. But his herky-jerky character arc has brought her along for the ride, making either his conscience or an even more cut-throat customer depending on the needs of the moment. If you slide Cal comfortably into the no-one-man-should-have-all-that-power slot, you can locate the true moral dilemma in Sarah rather than in him. To put it in terms fans of this show will likely appreciate, you can make her the Jesse to his Walt, in other words.

STEP THREE: END EDDIE’S “MYSTERY” STORYLINE

So Eddie’s got this huge scar across his back and arm, and until this week’s episode, when he said he got it when he was struck by lightning, the show kept treating it like a big mystery. It’s not! Of course he got struck by lightning—it happened on the mountain he climbed with cult founder Doc Meyer, and that’s what flung the old man off that Peruvian cliff, not Eddie murdering him. I mean, duh! Stop having characters gingerly ask about it, stop treating it like it’s completely baffling, and stop wasting time having characters still within the cult like Richard and Kodiak do this half-assed whodunnit about what happened.

STEP FOUR: START EDDIE’S MESSIAH STORYLINE

Just before his death (sorry, his “mysterious” death), Doc told Eddie he was the chosen son, the person prophesied to carry on the Meyerist Movement rather than Cal (or Sarah). That’s something you don’t see every day! Yet the show has continued as if the most interesting questions facing Eddie are the same ones facing anyone who leaves a cult: re-acclimating to society, dealing with being cut off from friends and family, the traumatic effects of ruptured belief systems, and so on. But The Path’s answer to L. Ron Hubbard didn’t tell this guy “don’t let the door hit you in the ass on your way out” when he decided to leave — he told him he was the frigging messiah. There’s a chance to tell a whole new kind of apostate narrative here, if they’ll only take it; this week’s episode hinted (almost imperceptibly) that the Light really is communicating with Eddie, so hey, it’s a start.

STEP FIVE: LET HAWK FLY

Let’s face it: Hawk Lane, Sarah and Eddie’s son with the soulful eyes and the grunge-era hairstyle, is a pretty dull character. If you must have him, dig into what is easily the least dull thing about him: his belief that he actually floated off the ground during one of the cult’s rituals. Let that consume his life instead of wasting his time attending Andrew Bird concerts with trustafarians and doing weak Oz Junior episodes.

STEP SIX: MORE RICHARD

An experienced member of the Meyerist clergy (for lack of a better term). A person of high rank in the organization yet not so high as to be tainted by the upper echelon’s hypocrisy. An orphan who overcame abandonment and disability with (as far as he believes, anyway) the help of the Light. Richard, the group’s chief mystic-therapist-inquisitor, is a unique and fascinating character. So naturally the show brings in a hunky hippie loner named Kodiak (!!!) to team up with him. Kodiak serves an entirely redundant role in Richard’s investigation into the death of Doc, the disappearance of high-ranking shaman Silas, the misdeeds of Cal and Sarah and Eddie, and so on. Richard is a much more interesting figure, and would make a more compelling antagonist to the main characters at this point, as he showed when he gave Cal the business in this week’s episode. Make it so.

STEP SEVEN: START THE WAR FOR THE MEYER THRONE

Played by Brian Stokes Mitchell and Adriane Lenox, high-ranking Meyerists Bill and Felicia were second only to Doc himself in the hierarchy, serving the same leadership role on the West Coast that their much younger counterpart Cal served in the East. The generation gap, the East Coast/West Coast rivalry angle, the status-quo candidates vs. the ambitious upstart, a potential racial element, and simply the strength of the actors themselves would make a full-fledged battle for supremacy between this power couple and the Cal/Sarah regime riveting viewing. Instead, Bill and Felicia are relegated to a handful of cameos per season, more or less rolling over for the Roberts takeover. Make them main characters if at all possible and devote a long arc to them fighting and losing against Cal, and you’ve got your series-defining Walt vs. the Chicken Man scenario.

STEP EIGHT: MAKE MEYERISM REAL

For Doc’s sake, give us some specifics on the Meyerist faith! With the exception of some nods in the direction of Scientology’s love of acronyms, pseudoscientific bio-readouts, and recorded confessions, the teachings we’ve seen from the Movement have almost all been amorphous New Age stuff you could hear pretty much anywhere in the world of alternative religion and spiritual healing. If the show is as willing to rip off The Master as brazenly as it did last week with its “change the color of the wall” experiment — which simply combined two exercises Joaquin Phoenix’s character had to do during his training in that much, much, much better film — it could learn a few more tricks and add some more concrete individual beliefs.

No, I don’t mean a whole belief system that actually makes sense. The whole point of these cults is that there is no such system; it’s all just one man’s flights of fancy, with a religion built ad hoc around them. Show us those flights of fancy, like this week’s practice of placing a member’s hand on a chemical-sensitive piece of paper and determining guilt or innocence by the color it changes to. Give us the equivalent of Xenu and thetans, or Sea Org and the Hole — individual, specific beliefs and practices that stand out of the hippy-dippy fog. Shows from The Wire to Breaking Bad to Mad Men to The Americans have proven that showing in detail how the sausage gets made for a particular profession makes the material more engaging, not less. And The Path needs that kind of power more than ever.

Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, the Observer, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.

Stream The Path on Hulu