Fun
Frisky
Nostalgic
Intense
Adventurous
Choked Up
Curious
Romantic
Weird
Of all the great things about television, the greatest is that it’s on every single day. TV history is being made, day in and day out, in ways big and small. In an effort to better appreciate this history, we’re taking a look back, every day, at one particular TV milestone.
IMPORTANT DATE IN TV HISTORY: September 14, 2003
PROGRAM ORIGINALLY AIRED ON THIS DATE: Carnivale, “Milfay” (Season 1, Episode 1) [Watch on HBO GO or HBO Now]
WHY IT’S IMPORTANT: Carnivale was a good show. It was not always a successful show, certainly not commercially, but not always artistically, either. It sometimes lumbered along without a whole lot of forward momentum — leisurely trudging alomg with its traveling circus of weirdos, lingering on moments of portent with the promise of later payoff — and by the time things REALLY got crazy, it was too late and the series was cancelled.
But for all its frustrations, Carnivale left a good impression of only for its ambition. While the other great shows of its era were still largely set within the comfortable realms of crime, medicine, and politics, Carnivale was tackling religion, mythology, allegory, and history all at once. It would not be until Game of Thrones that HBO was able to land an audience for something that dealt so directly with religious mysticism. It’s also interesting, today, to line up Carnivale next to a show like American Horror Story: Freak Show, both set in similar milieus, both wildly ambitious. But even there, AHS took its setting of lobster-clawed boys and bearded women and filled it with the now-familiar camp that audiences have come to expect from that series. Carnivale took serious themes (the dust bowl) and off-kilter settings (a traveling side-show) and then went the extra mile by filling it with a biblical battle between avatars of God and Satan.
It should also be noted that Carnivale was the rare HBO series to be so modest in its successes that its stars didn’t ever really disperse to other HBO projects. While the cast of Deadwood continues to permeate most of television (and rightly so), Carnivale remains the rare showcase for talent like Clancy Brown, Amy Madigan, Patrick Bauchau, Tim DeKay, Clea DuVall, Cynthia Ettinger and Carla Gallo. (Though you can, and should, see Toby Huss killing it on Halt and Catch Fire.)
It’s tough to say whether Carnivale would have been a better-received show today than it was a decade ago. It certainly wouldn’t have had to deal with the perception problem that came with premiering smack in the middle of the great Golden Age of HBO, alongside The Sopranos, Six Feet Under, The Wire, and Sex and the City. That was a lot to live up to. It shouldn’t be a surprise that not every show could.
[You can watch Carnivale on HBO Go and HBO Now]
Joe Reid (@joereid) is a freelance writer living in Brooklyn. You can find him leaving flowers for Mrs. Landingham at the corner of 18th and Potomac.
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