Freaky Sundays

Okay. I will grant you that dwarves, bearded ladies and catatonic psychicsare a bit old hat, as are carnivals, the Great Depression, and perhaps even the year 1934, in which Carnivàle, the lavishly enigmatic new series on HBO (Sun., 9 p.m.), takes place.

On the other hand, are dwarves and bearded ladies any more clichéd than charismatic special agents (Navy NCIS, Threat Matrix), ballsy female investigators (Cold Case, Karen Sisco), cute blonds (Miss Match), neurotic singles (Coupling), schoolgirls with special powers (Joan of Arcadia) or any of the other major roles of this year’s fall season? I think not. So let’s give the freaks a break, shall we?

I once read an interview with Bob Dylan in which the mysterioso bard said that he didn’t really believe in democracy; he believed in kings and queens. An odd thing for an American to say, but he was probably referring to an ultimate belief in divine right and a radical vision of good and evil. Temperamentally, his songs hark back to an America that is mostly long gone, but which sticks around in odd corners of the nation’s psyche. You could catch a glimpse of it on a recent episode of Larry King, in which the ageless anchor interviewed the Reverend Franklin Graham, the slick, camera-ready minister who delivered the sermon at the recent memorial service for Johnny Cash.

“This man’s in heaven,” the Reverend told King. “God forgavehim. God cleansedhim. And he received Christ into his heart as his own personal lord . . .” The Reverend sounded distinctly like a huckster to me, and for a moment, we could have been on the set of Carnivàle.

In one of my favorite scenes from the first three episodes, the traveling carnival whose cryptic goings-on are the subject of this series arrives in Tipton, a dust bowl town laid low by the Depression. When the local bigwig tells Samson (Michael J. Anderson, Twin Peaks), the wisecracking dwarf who runs the carnival’s day-to-day operations, that he’s not going to let a bunch of carnies rip off the good citizens of Tipton in times of economic hardship, Samson has an idea. The troupe’s newest recruit, the 18-year-old fugitive, Ben Hawkins (Nick Stahl), has a reputation for faith healing. So Samson decides temporarily to drop the sword-swallowing, fortunetelling and striptease acts and transforms the carnival into a religious-revival show in which Hawkins will heal the (carefully chosen) sick.

“Think they’ll buy it?” a troupe member asks Samson, when the latter reveals his plan.

“These birds?” Samson replies contemptuously, referring to the townfolk of Tipton. “They’ll buy anything.”

(Samson is a great character. To misquote the great Randy Newman song “Rednecks,” he’s like a smart-ass New York dwarf.)

But what does Samson believe? “To each generation,” he tells us in a portentous voice-over at the beginning of the first episode, “is born a creature of light and a creature of darkness” — not exactly the statement of a hardened atheist. What’s more, he adds, the story we are about to see takes place in a time — the 1930s — when the final showdown between Good and Evil will begin. I suspect it will be well into this 12-part series before we get an inkling of what Samson means by that. Or maybe never.

Less obscure than Samson’s Gnostic musings are the identities of the creatures of light and darkness. The former is probably Hawkins, who can restore dead kittens to life and, in the opening episode, heals a young girl crippled by polio. Hawkins’ background is mysterious and his conversation is limited. The women like him, however, particularly Sofie the tarot-card reader (Clea DuVall), whose occasional anachronistic girl-power rants make her the least-convincing character in the drama.

So who’s the Evildoer? That would seem to be Brother Justin (Clancy Brown), a self-flagellating Methodist pastor in California who, like Hawkins, suffers from apocalyptic nightmares and visions. He cannot heal the sick, but he does have the ability to make people vomit money (coins only), and his enemies are often struck down by seizures at opportune moments. His great ambition is to become pastor to the “immigrants” — the dust bowl evacuees of Oklahoma, whom nobody else gives a damn about. Justin and Hawkins are
clearly on a collision course, but to what purpose it’s impossible to say.

As the above suggests, Carnivàle is a meaty, possibly indigestible, stew of characters, images and ideas. Its pace is stately, and there are passages when you don’t know what’s going on and don’t really care, either. But at its best, it has the allure of time travel. In one scene, young Hawkins walks into a peep-show tent. Onstage, Hopperesque women silently display their breasts, and for a moment you really do feel as if you’re at a carnival in 1934. Today, if you have enough cable channels, you can stare at dozens of breasts all night long. But in this brief scene, Carnivàle conjures up a world and time when they were definitely not available for 24/7 viewing. For now, that’s no small achievement.