Andrew Garfield / Under The Banner of Heaven / FX

Straight from the True Detective playbook. This will be huge with the industry.

oh my god this series is so galling and so all over the place. I finished episode 2 last night and I just wanna quit. I'll probably keep going because I'm committed now but I really wanna stop.

nothing can prepare you for cheesy historical recreations like the kind you see in cheap TV docs but in a narrative and clearly fictionalized drama series. As with doc recreations, the individuals in these Mormonism "flashbacks" (complete with frontier garb and cabin sets) are not characters but merely supplementary props, but they're all the more bizarre in this case for supplementing a fictionalized drama driven by actors and a script. Since posting in February I have read Krakauer's excellent book and it's obvious what went wrong in Black's adaptation. Krakaur's book doubles as true-crime for this one event and cursory history of Mormonism in general but on TV you need to pick a damn lane and Black clearly didn't.

I could vent further. Garfield so far feels way out of his depth and not convincing as a cop and Wyatt Russell (playing bad guy Dan Lafferty) is so over-the-top that he borders on cartoonish (watch him waving a bat and yelling like a petulant child at a taxman and try not to giggle). Likewise, Brenda Lafferty (played by Daisy Edgar-Jones) is unnaturally positioned as a worldly free-spirited woman who's nevertheless intensely devout and conservative, and her repeated naïve pushes against the Laffertys' patriarchal traditionalism makes her look unable to read the room more than anything else (she isn't the feminist heroine the show wants her to be). And despite Mormons hating this series like the plague, the scenes with Joseph Smith so far have 1) completely glazed over his polygamy, 2) completely ignored his criminal activity, and 3) presented a one-dimensional depiction of Smith's Mormons as innocents and victims of religious bigotry. I'm sure these goofy recreations will continue throughout the series so maybe this corrects itself (?)

on a positive note, Gil Birmingham as Garfield's seasoned and cynical partner is the cast MVP. Very archetypal role but Birmingham totally inhabits it and has fun with it.

tl/dr: just read the book