TVLine and EW Review The Path

The premiere date for The Path is getting closer and closer by each passing minute. And with that comes reviews for the series. Today TVLine and EW posted their reviews and gave the series a B but had good things to say about the series. Each one is singing praise for Hugh and his performance of Cal in the series, which makes us even more excited to see what Hugh has done with this character and how it’ll look in each episode of the series. But then again, as a fan of his career, we all can agree that we didn’t expect any less from him in this role since he always gives it 100% and really can pull a character out of a screen and into anything we’d all like to watch and rewatch (and gif, reblog, tweet, retweet, so on and so forth). You can click to read more below or visit the reviews at their respective links. I have highlighted some parts in the reviews by including them in quotes below. warning: possible spoilers

but Dancy is especially artful at keeping a low-grade darkness beneath the surface of his character’s carefully constructed and relentlessly zen facade. In one especially creepy scene, Cal listens to a self-help CD in his car, pulling down the mirror to practice the art of using his eyes to convey seriousness, amusement, even empathy — and it leaves you wondering if somewhere in his basement, there’s a pit containing a terrified woman, a fluffy white dog and a bottle of lotion.

Buoyed by Dancy’s magnetism, Monaghan’s versatility and Paul’s intensity, The Path may not turn you into a complete convert, but it’ll be hard for you not to at least feel its pull.

The show’s best character is Cal Roberts (Hugh Dancy), the commune’s ambitious leader. His many unresolved flaws betray the limits of Meyerism. He knows a secret that could topple everything. But he doesn’t want to. He believes that with progressive reforms—more activism, empathy, and power sharing; less secrecy, crazy, and cult of personality—Meyerism can do redemptive good, and he chases that idealism with reckless zeal.

Run the race, keep the faith: The Path is a provocative journey.

Full reviews are included below:

posted on March 24, 2016 over at tvline.com
by Michael Slezak
Ambiguity may not be the end goal of most religions, but it’s the cornerstone of Hulu’s new drama series The Path, a meditative examination of a fast-growing cult (or is it merely a movement?) and its ambitious, sometimes menacing leader.

Hannibal‘s Hugh Dancy stars as Cal Robertson, head of East Coast operations for the Meyerist Movement and heir apparent to its founder Stephen Meyer, who is secretly/rapidly dying of untreatable cancer in a compound in Peru.

Cal’s optimistic speeches about achieving world peace — one troubled soul at a time — and his outreach to disaster victims, drug addicts and all manner of troubled souls seems admirable enough, but Dancy is especially artful at keeping a low-grade darkness beneath the surface of his character’s carefully constructed and relentlessly zen facade. In one especially creepy scene, Cal listens to a self-help CD in his car, pulling down the mirror to practice the art of using his eyes to convey seriousness, amusement, even empathy — and it leaves you wondering if somewhere in his basement, there’s a pit containing a terrified woman, a fluffy white dog and a bottle of lotion.

That sinking feeling pervades The Path thanks to the fact that Cal (and factions of the Meyerist movement in general) aren’t averse to head-against-the-microwave street justice, some light kidnapping/imprisonment of wayward members and possibly the staged suicides of those considering a switch to, say, that nice Episcopal church down about a half-mile down the road. (Cal’s deeply icky relationship with a new recruit named Mary, who looks to Meyerism to help her grapple with her unspeakable experiences with childhood sexual abuse, will drop said sinking feelings right to the bottom of the ocean.)

Our entry into The Path, however, comes via Aaron Paul’s Eddie, a mid-level player in Meyerism who’s married to one of its ranking members, an interesting juxtaposition of personality traits named Sarah (True Detective‘s Michelle Monaghan) — who back in the day was romantically torn between Eddie and Cal, and is now one of the key advisors to the latter.

When we meet Eddie, he’s just come back from a hallucinogenic-fueled field trip in Peru — Meyerists like their doobies as much as they disdain meat products and current pop culture — one that prompted a vision of his late older brother beckoning him into a room where Dr. Meyer lay comatose with a yellow boa constrictor slithering up his body. Now, Eddie’s not so sure about what he saw (or didn’t), but his questions about the health/healthiness of Meyer, the Meyerist movement and the entire life he’s built within the organization’s upstate New York settlement continue to nag him.

Eddie’s crisis of faith leads him to act like a man who’s in the midst of an affair, and after Sarah follows him to a late-night hotel rendezvous — a wonderfully paranoid moment punctuated by a strident score that’s reminiscent of a triggered security alarm — we find he’d rather make up a story about a tryst with comely cult member Miranda (Minka Kelly) than admit to meeting with an erstwhile Meyerist who claims cult wrongdoing. (Alcatraz‘s Sarah Jones, as Eddie’s new frenemy, is wonderfully paranoid — which doesn’t mean Cal and his followers aren’t out to get her).

While there are underpinnings of menace laced into nearly every aspect of the outwardly benign Meyerist movement — Sarah’s pronouncement about energy and light and unburdening one’s secrets is kind of appealing, until she’s pushing Eddie into 14 days of imprisonment and psychological abuse (aka the Infidelity Rehab Program) — creator Jessica Goldberg (Parenthood, Camp) and executive producer Jason Katims (Parenthood, Friday Night Lights) don’t seem all that interested in making The Path a pulse-pounding drama about Eddie’s escape from cult life.

Instead, they focus on what draws lost souls into a collective, how the need for power and control can corrupt even the most tranquil groups and why — as Kathleen Turner, playing Cal’s ferocious alcoholic mother, notes in Episode 3 — “wanting to be someone else never works.”

Where The Path sometimes loses its way is in its deeply deliberate — some might say pokey — pacing and its failure to clearly define the central cult beyond an organic, new-agey, Scientology-adjacent, slightly mystical vibe. (For all the ancillary folks who crop up in each episode, you could argue that Meyerism remains the most sketchily defined character of all… although I have to admit its eye-inside-a-machine-gear symbol is both pretty and pretty ominous.)

There are also moments you’ll find yourself wishing Goldberg and Katims had trimmed away some of the less vital elements of their dense tale and cleared a path toward higher stakes and greater suspense. In Episode 4, when Eddie and Sarah leap fully clothed into a pond in the midst of a crisp, autumn afternoon, it sticks out like a clichéd thumb, as does a subplot in which Prison Break‘s Rockmond Dunbar shows up as the requisite FBI Agent With Questions.

Still, The Path benefits greatly from the way it takes us into a murky world and repeatedly makes us question how we feel about its protagonists. Cal isn’t only a dangerous egomaniac and an opportunist, he’s also a true-believer who’s overcome a difficult past and now wants to spread the good word to a bigger audience. Sarah’s not just all the way up on Rung 8, peering down at those beneath her, she’s also a wife and mother who’s scared of losing everything she holds dear — and she’s actually self-aware enough to verbalize it. Eddie, for his part, may be on the brink of true clarity, but does he really want the truth at the cost of his happy home?

Buoyed by Dancy’s magnetism, Monaghan’s versatility and Paul’s intensity, The Path may not turn you into a complete convert, but it’ll be hard for you not to at least feel its pull.

The TVLine Bottom Line: The Path is good, but falls just short of being sect-tacular.

posted on March 24, 2016 over at ew.com
by Jeff Jensen
We last saw Aaron Paul on television screaming into the night and fleeing that devil Walter White. You could easily imagine his new Hulu series, The Path, as a spiritual sequel to Breaking Bad, tracking a possible future for lost soul Jesse Pinkman. Paul plays Eddie, a man with a traumatic, self-destructive past who has found healing and purpose within a community most would dub a cult. Founded by a recluse who’s somewhere in Peru communing with “the Truth” that’s giving him “the Message,” which describes a path to enlightenment called “the Ladder,” Meyerism is many strains of dubious transcendentalism (Scientology, apocalyptic Christianity, hippie mysticism, self-help psych) rolled into one fat metaphorical joint. Eddie’s new life is barely established when the premiere sends him on a retreat and gives him a chemically assisted revelation that rocks his faith—a Pauline conversion to sobering doubt. How legit was his visionary drug trip? Does he seek clarity or stay comfortably agnostic?

The Path struggles to keep Eddie’s predicament believable, and it makes a questionable choice in episode 2 to clarify some of his mysterious experience for viewers. But creator Jessica Goldberg and exec producer Jason Katims (both late of Parenthood) generate enough twists and resonances to keep you engaged. Not wanting to destabilize his community, and terrified of losing his family—his wife, Sarah (Michelle Monaghan), is a high-ranking believer born into the movement; his sensitive teenage son, Hawk (Kyle Allen), is waffling on whether to be a Meyerist for life—Eddie hides behind a deception to explain his angst: He claims he had a fling with an old flame (Minka Kelly) while on the retreat. Goldberg and Katims manage this gambit well so it never becomes tedious, and they let it create evolving, tragic complications for everyone involved.

Sly, intricate ironies abound on The Path. Eddie is a phony philanderer who is committing honest-to-God spiritual adultery: He’s cheating on both the truth and the Truth. A misunderstanding or outright lie that takes on a life of its own? That’s religion for many skeptics. Paul and Monaghan are always intense and credible, but I wanted more. Their characters have damage and history but not much internal complexity. The show’s best character is Cal Roberts (Hugh Dancy), the commune’s ambitious leader. His many unresolved flaws betray the limits of Meyerism. He knows a secret that could topple everything. But he doesn’t want to. He believes that with progressive reforms—more activism, empathy, and power sharing; less secrecy, crazy, and cult of personality—Meyerism can do redemptive good, and he chases that idealism with reckless zeal.

The Path is best when it offers more than just skepticism and cynicism. It’s most interesting as an allegory about our relationship to truth and the value of religions in a seemingly godless world, at a place in history far removed from their point of origin. Perseverance is required. The premiere clunks as a premise setter and paranoid thriller. Some story lines start poorly—Hawk’s romance with a nonbeliever (Amy Forsyth); a bitter ex-believer’s (Sarah Jones) bid to recruit Eddie to her anti-Meyerism crusade—though they slowly improve as they take surprising turns. Run the race, keep the faith: The Path is a provocative journey. B