'The Path': A Long and Winding Road
The Path is a thoughtful new drama from Hulu that’s a portrait of a faith that takes the form of a cult. This fictional cult is Meyerism, a belief system that structures degrees of enlightenment as rungs on a ladder, with each adherent aiming to ascend, through study and devotion to the cause, to the highest rung to achieve… what, exactly? Perfect calm? Bliss? Divinity? The disciples of Meyerism — who include most prominently Breaking Bad’s Aaron Paul, Hannibal’s Hugh Dancy, and True Detective’s Michelle Monaghan — are clinging to that ladder on different rungs, at different stages of faith, even as doubt works like a swarm of termites to weaken the ladder, leading to a potential fall from grace.
You have to give show creator Jessica Goldberg (Parenthood) a lot of credit for coming up with a new religion that is extensively detailed, filled out with its own jargon and systems of devotion. Whenever someone accuses Meyerism of being a cult, Dancy’s Cal — a high-strung, high lieutenant in the cause — barks tersely, “We’re a spiritual movement.” And Cal is not the greatest advertisement for the movement, what with his twitching jaw muscles, his intense glare, and his tendency to get awfully authoritarian.
Of course, some people join various movements and religions for just the sort of iron-fisted sureness Cal projects. That’s why one of The Path’s most interesting subplots involves the cult’s side business as a substance-abuse interventionist-rehab program. We see a wealthy man’s druggie son dragged off to a Meyerist den — Dad is dubious and contemptuous of Meyerism’s mystical hoodoo, but Mom, having tried everything she can think of to cure her wayward kid, allows the young man to be taken away for healing.
Monaghan’s Sarah is a true believer; indeed, at her most pious, she is a living embodiment of the phrase “holier than thou.” Her husband, Aaron Paul’s Eddie, has recently returned from Peru (Meyerism seems to have two bases of operation — upstate New York and Peru) where a hallucinogenic training session has left his devotion shaken.
Watch the first three minutes of The Path:
For a while, The Path had me hooked with its chatter about the Meyerist goal “to be everything God intended,” and I was taken in by the early-scenes mystery of why the founder of the movement looks like an old man being kept on life support in a hospital bed, with the surreal touch of having a large snake slithering around his still body.
But as it proceeded, I started getting antsy during all the so-serious talk about vague concepts such as “the neo-self… before The Damage came” — rewordings of the Christian concept of Original Sin, is how I interpreted it. I started rooting for Eddie to break away and blow the whistle on the cult movement, which gulls its followers into believing stuff that Cal, in an ambitious power-grab, starts making up (or is he making it up? perhaps he’s a living vessel for Meyerism’s message).
The Path is a winding one — the show has pacing problems, which is to say, it’s awfully slow in many spots. The acting is very good, but too much of the series forces the performers to play one note: grave concern or worry. During various episodes (there are 10 of them), and during some of the more muddled moments, I felt I was watching a TV version of the phenomenon Robert Greenfield writes about in his wonderful, shamefully obscure 1975 book The Spiritual Supermarket: An Account of Gurus Gone Public in America: “first-person accounts filled with drama and imprecision, a nether land that none who have traversed seem able to describe to others.” I’m sure there are going to be many converts to The Path, but it left me an agnostic.
Two episodes of The Path premiere March 30 on Hulu, followed by one new episode each Wednesday.
