Will CW's Meta-Meta 'Cult' Be More Than a Cult Show?
One thing you can say about CW's upcoming Cult: it looks like a lot of other CW shows. There's lots of nighttime shooting and colored lighting. (Arrow and Beauty and the Beast have apparently appropriated all of the kryptonite-green gels at the set shop, so Cult goes red and blue.) But maybe, the comic book lighting is where the similarity to the other CW fantasy shows ends. Yes, the mystery-thriller has the usual CW vibe. But it's also got a twisty structure, and just might have enough smarts to create its own buzz and get more than an, er, cult following.
Talking about Cult, which premieres Tuesday, February 19, at 9 p.m. ET, means describing it. And the premise is a bit convoluted. Cult is about a TV show (also called Cult) and a missing person investigation that may be related to the show. The fictional show-within-a-show is about a Waco-style leader, Billy Grimm (Robert Knepper, top, Prison Break, Shameless) and it's all the rage among its obsessed fans.
People gather together to watch it each week and dress up like the characters. There are chat rooms and websites by X-Files-style fans where they discusss the clues and codes they believe are embedded in the show. The series also focuses on the people making and producing Cult (which, by the way, also airs on CW).
So, we, the viewers, are watching a show about fans watching a TV show. And we're watching people make the show. Got it?
Good, because there's more.
Cult's main character, Jeff Sefton, (Matt Davis, The Vampire Diaries) is stock CW model material. He's a down-on-his-luck newspaper reporter exiled to writing pieces on the city council and other dog-catcher stories. Jeff's brother Nate is deep into the Cult series. So deep that he's paranoid that he's being followed by other fans of the show, who, in fact, may be linked to a real cult inside the fictional one.
When Nate disappears, Jeff goes on the hunt. As he follows a trail littered with cryptic DVDs, notebooks and viral computer codes he begins to believe that the fanatic Cult followers might just be what his kooky brother said they were.
Eventually, the whole Cult burrito gets wrapped inside another tortilla, and you may just get so bound up you won't know where the "real" Cult begins and the fictional Cult ends. Maybe, by that point, you won't care, because that may also be half the fun.
Cult smacks of the better brain twisters, such as David Cronenberg's Existenz and the ill-fated NBC Awake (2012), which bounced back and forth between two alternating realities. This new slant on the Russian doll within a Russian doll won't have very far to stretch for plot. Jeff's investigation, the fans and characters of Cult, and the shadowy real cult offer plenty of territory for the writers to wander around in.
The better conspiracy/mystery shows like Millennium (1996-99) and X-Files (1993-2002) were eventually diminished by the waywardness of having to widen the stakes each season, since the end game was never defined. Even David Lynch had all he could handle with Twin Peaks (1990-91) and, by the second season, began depending on the paranormal to make the story work. With Cult, the boundaries are seemingly defined at the outset.
There are off-kilter moments, such as when Jeff, — on the heels of his brother's disappearance — catches a TV promo for the upcoming episode of Cult in which Billy Grimm speaks right to the camera. Of course, he might be speaking in character, or out of character, (and out might actually be in, eventually).
These tantalizing clips of Grimm, when the scripted show spills into reality, are the best moments of Cult. It's as though you can't even trust your fiction to be false — a quirky, impossibly queer effect that's not easily achieved.
The question is whether Cult can be sustained, and whether audiences will stick around to watch a show about people watching television.