HBO's 'Carnivale' Launches its 2nd Season: The Cosmic Battle Intensifies

The Emmy Award-winning dramatic television series Carnivale began its second 12-episode season on HBO last Sunday night and after a brief recapitulation of Season One at the opening, many of the puzzling mysteries that kept viewers wondering a year ago are summarily resolved in an opening narrative that sets the stage for a more clear-cut battle between the cosmic forces of Good and Evil.

It's a magnificent Grapes of Wrath-style setting for this deliciously entertaining series, that roams from the Oklahoma dust bowl to the orange tree orchids of California during the deepest throes of the Great Depression in 1934 and includes compelling doses of magic, mystery and the supernatural.

The series includes some of Hollywood's most gifted character actors and actresses, not the least being Clea DuVall, the 27-year-old whose considerable credits range from The Faculty to Girl, Interrupted, the Astronaut's Wife, Laramie Project and the Slaughter Rule. DuVall's character, the tarot card-wielding Sofie, was engulfed in flames as the first season ended, leaving us all to wonder if she'd be back. Maybe it was left up in the air, so to speak, because her contract for Season Two had not yet been finalized, but it's good she's still on board.

Also in the cast are the main antagonists, who've yet to meet face to face except in dreams. The devil, himself, is incarnated in the form of Brother Justin, who is now in the process of arising to fulfill his doomsday mission on earth as a Bible-thumping "hell, fire and brimstone" evangelical preacher with a nationwide radio ministry. The character is reminiscent of an actual historical figure, the pro-fascist Father Caughlin who gained a wide and highly-disturbing radio following in the U.S. during the Depression. Brother Justin is played with appropriate sinister foreboding by Clancy Brown, no stranger to evil guy roles including in the Shawshank Redemption and as the dead dad in Pet Sematary II, among many others.

In Carnivale, the task of stopping Brother Justin has fallen to 18-year-old Ben Hawkins, a naive youth orphaned by the death of his mother during an Oklahoma dust storm and barely alive, himself, when the Carnivale happens by to pick him up and employ him as a "roustie," one of the crew that sets up and takes down the tents and runs errands. Hawkins knows he has supernatural gifts but wants no part of them. His mentors, so to speak, a menagerie of weird characters in the Carnivale with greater or lesser appreciation for Hawkins' ultimate role in the cosmic order of things, try to bring him along to grasp his ominous responsibility. Hawkins is played in low-key deadpan fashion by the talented 25-year-old Nick Stahl, who comes with a long list of credits beginning with The Man Without a Face and more recently Bully, In the Bedroom and Terminator 3.

A key player, and narrator for the opening of the second season, is the diminutive Samson, who runs the Carnivale on behalf of the mysterious, hidden and sometimes even invisible Management. Samson is played effectively by Michel J. Anderson of Twin Peaks fame and is the perfect complement to the hodge-podge troupe inclusive of a bearded lady, snake-man, dancing Siamese twins, a mother-daughter team of busty and large-hipped burlesque dancers with their emcee husband/father, an Absinthe-swilling mind reader and a fully paralyzed psychic, the last two not making it out of the first season alive.

Predictably, a growing cult of Carnivale devotees is active on the Internet, buzzing about every latest nuance of the considerable, remaining mysteries on line. Who, really, is Management, they ponder. The hidden character with considerable supernatural, including morphing, capacities of his own and Golum-like voice played a more active role in Sunday's first episode of the new season than throughout almost all the first season. He obviously grasps the big picture but where does he ultimately fit in? In the good fun of this series, we're all content to let it unfold, even as speculation among die-hard fans runs rampant.

Those who wish to get in on the Internet chattering can start by going to http://tv.groups.yahoo.com/group/CarnivaleHBO.

Created by Daniel Knauf, Carnivale's first season won five Emmy Awards, mostly in technical categories. But it's not surprising that a series depicting Satan as a Bible-thumping evangelist and his principal adversaries as a rag-tag band of carnival odd socks might not sit well in the current American cultural wasteland dominated by the religious right.

However, its rich dialogue and colorful characters are a far cry from and in stark contrast to the painfully shallow hard body parade disguised as drama series, Lost, that is apparently the best that major network TV can produce. That series went way beyond the pale with egregious plugs for Halliburton in its last episode. For every award that Lost might ever get, Carnivale, Six Feet Under and series like them should get a hundred.