The finale of the first season of The Path, one of the most remarkable pop culture explorations of religion in recent memory, is coming to a television screen (or, laptop screen, since it’s a direct-to-Hulu series) near you on Wednesday. If you’re new the show, I don’t recommend gorging on it. With The Path, Hulu wisely broke with the popular direct-to-stream practice of dumping an entire season online at once, perhaps realizing that a show this cerebral, and this thematically daring, would be slightly baffling if absorbed in bulk. With its complex layers of interpersonal and theological drama, The Path is just about binge-proof (which is probably one of the highest compliments a TV show can be paid these days).
The Path is about a fictional, modern-day spiritual movement, or possibly a cult (the show’s brilliance lies in its unwillingness to draw distinctions on this point), that navigates a series of inflection points. The Myerists barely get a moment’s peace: Although few followers know it, the supposedly semi-divine Dr. Steve Myer is secretly dying in Peru, setting up an impending power vacuum that one of the movement’s most charismatic and potentially dangerous men (Hannibal’s Hugh Dancy) is vying to fill. At the same time, Myerism is growing, forcing the movement to come to grips with a non-believing world that followers had grown accustomed to viewing as irremediably corrupted and hostile.