New CW thriller 'Cult': A cleverly captivating show-within-a-show
Be forewarned: Watch CW's new thriller, Cult, about an FBI agent's dogged, quixotic investigation into a dangerous religious cult, at your own risk. See it and you may lose your mind.
Be forewarned: Watch CW's new thriller, Cult, about an FBI agent's dogged, quixotic investigation into a dangerous religious cult, at your own risk. See it and you may lose your mind.
Perhaps even your soul.
That would be Cult, the faux show-within-a-show in the real CW series Cult, a self-referential show-within-a-show-within-a-global-conspiracy conspiracy thriller about the deadly effects of watching a cult show called Cult (about a dangerous religious cult) that is produced by a real-life nefarious cult as part of a grand mind-control conspiracy.
It premieres Tuesday at 9 p.m.
Yeah, it's complicated.
Created by writer-producer Rockne S. O'Bannon, the mastermind behind Farscape and SeaQuest 2032, Cult sets up its tortuous, if at times also torturous, premise in a dense 43-minute pilot. (Wish the network had shelled out the cash for a feature-length debut.)
Targeted at the core CW thriller fan already hooked on Supernatural and The Vampire Diaries, the opening episode is wildly uneven, at times downright irritating. But it's equally intriguing, compelling, and full of potential.
Cult stars Matthew Davis (The Vampire Diaries) as Jeff Sefton, a disgraced former Washington Post political correspondent who moves to Los Angeles to write for a second-rate local rag.
He's sucked into the Cult cult conspiracy when his mentally ill, drug-addled younger brother Nate (James Pizzinato) tells him that a mysterious visionary named Steven Rea (no relation to the Inquirer film critic) has created a TV series that's filled with secret messages. Nate seems to believe that Cult's most hard-core fans actually are members of a real cult that uses the show and its website to suck in and indoctrinate unwitting viewers.
Then Nate falls off the face of the earth! Jeff decides to use his reporting skills to investigate when one of the show's lowly production assistants, the comely Skye (Jessica Lucas), confirms Nate's suspicions, telling him that fans have reported mysterious, deadly real-life goings on that parallel the show's plot.
The pilot ends on a scary, creepy cliff-hanger that will make genre fans desperate for more.
Cult makes clever use of the show-within-a-show motif. We are treated to extensive scenes from the faux Cult, which has its own story line and cast. That includes the inimitable Robert Knepper (Heroes, Prison Break) as cult leader Billy Grimm. An expert in playing super-sinister-if-disarmingly-charming evildoers, he livens up the goings-on in ways most thrillingly serpentine.
The CW did not make any further episodes available to critics, so it's impossible to tell whether Cult will live up to its potential. But I can't wait to tune in next week, if only to find out whether O'Bannon and company can pull it off.