First off, in order to get a fuller understanding of seasons one and two, start here with the always-excellent Alan Sepinwall at HitFix. Then go here for a review of the season three premiere episode by Tim Surette of TV.com. You’ll get a link to a season three review in a little bit, but let’s first walk through the season before getting there.
If season one and a large chunk of season two had to (necessarily) take us very deep inside the world of Daniel Holden (played by Aden Young), season three expanded the reach of Rectify, giving us a lot more insight into the characters that have been trying to understand Daniel.
This process of understanding Daniel isn’t a plot device in which characters are force-marched by the show to be something they’re not; it’s central to the series and its unhurried, textured development. Daniel would naturally need to be understood by people who hadn’t seen him for a long time. He’s also a constant puzzle to others because of all the disordered decisions he makes. At age 18, Daniel proceeded to spend 19 years in prison — to be more specific, death row — for a crime (the murder of 16-year-old Hanna Dean) he didn’t commit. Daniel is an utter mystery to himself, so it only makes sense that his family can’t figure him out, either.
This nexus of relationships — Daniel with his mother Janet (J. Smith-Cameron), sister Amantha (Abigail Spencer), stepfather Ted Sr. (Bruce McKinnon), stepbrother Ted Jr. (Clayne Crawford) and his wife, Tawney (Adelaide Clemens) — is constantly held in a delicate balance. Though the most distant from Daniel in terms of blood (or perhaps, precisely because of that fact), Tawney — full of evangelical zeal but without the threatening fire-and-brimstone style — becomes very close to Daniel in the first season of the show. This bond leads to Daniel’s baptism and therefore greatly pleases Tawney, but that same closeness also makes Ted Jr. jealous and angry. It ultimately drives a wedge between husband and wife which continues to permeate the series and its movements at the end of season three.
In season one, Daniel, Tawney and Amantha come to the forefront of the show, because Daniel’s relationships with those two women are his most immediate sources of support. Janet’s love for her son is apparent in the first two seasons, but it’s clear that she’s trying to learn how to care for Daniel. It’s the product of caution, not coldness, but it does create a little more distance between characters.
In season two — thanks to 10 episodes instead of six — Rectify’s closed environment in the fictional town of Paulie, Ga. (the show is shot on location in the actual town of Griffin, Ga.) is able to expand. We get to see more of (and inside) Janet and her relationship with Ted Sr., but the scope of the series works back and forth between the family realm and the legal-political realm.
Season one involved some legal tensions involving the original prosecutor of Daniel’s case, Roland Foulkes (Michael O’Neill) — who has since become a Georgia State Senator — and Daniel’s lawyer, Jon Stern (Luke Kirby). Those tensions are heightened even more in season two, as the show’s main plot development — what really did happen on that night in question when Daniel was 18? — is given some attention in the story, alongside the meticulous building of each character in Daniel’s family. We get to see how Sheriff Carl Daggett (J.D. Evermore) interacts with people above him in the local political and law-enforcement power structure, and with Daniel as well. In turn, Daniel’s cluttered and confused dealings with Sheriff Daggett add to the already-complicated picture of his past.
If season one is the stark portrayal of Daniel’s bizarre new world following his release from death row and prison, season two throws a big curveball toward every central character by creating fresh layers of legal drama that Daniel and his extended family must confront. No one is spared the effects of each advancement in Sheriff Daggett’s pursuit of the case, or Senator Foulkes’s insistence behind the scenes that Daniel has to be prosecuted and made to leave the community.
What happens in the realm of law enforcement in season two then boomerangs back to Daniel’s family. Late in season one, Ted Jr. was choked out by Daniel following a heated confrontation between the two, stemming from Daniel’s growing affinity for Tawney and Ted Jr.’s insistence that Daniel keep his distance from her. A good deal of season two involves the undercurrent of suspense created by Ted Jr.’s knowledge that if he presses charges against Daniel, he’ll undercut his relationship with Janet, his stepmother, and fracture the larger Holden and Talbot families. (Talbot is the family name of Janet’s husband, Ted Sr.) Ted Jr. wrestles with this decision, and it adds yet more wrenchingly difficult scenes to a show already overflowing with them.
In season two, the larger context of Rectify breathes, but when that season ended, we were still left without an understanding of why Ted Jr. is who he is as a person. We know he and Tawney are drifting apart, and that the relationship between Tawney and Daniel has a lot to do with it, but there’s a deeper history which hasn’t yet been revealed.
That, to me, is what season three is fundamentally about, even though Sheriff Daggett’s continued pursuit of the truth arrives at important new intersections of urgency and revelation.
Ray McKinnon, as series creator and executive producer, does a great job of spreading each episode to each mini-cluster of characters and thereby not accelerating the advancement of any one character at the expense of others. Rectify, if you haven’t been able to tell already, is the “slow food movement” of television shows. If some entertainment content is fast food or junk food served a minute after you order it, Rectify is the brisket you take a day or more to carefully cook so that it’s perfect (and it pretty much is, by the way). The series doesn’t leap by many months or years from one episode to the next; it generally adheres to very slow movements of time, which is perfect for a television creation that allows moments to sit and linger… not just with the characters themselves, but with the audience.
Having said that McKinnon distributes time fairly evenly to all the characters — and keeping in mind that every actor in the series is first-rate — there do seem to be two characters who stand out in season three, as hinted at above. If we didn’t previously know why Ted Jr. and Tawney are the way they are, we get crucial exposition of each character in the six-episode third season. This leads to showcase performances by Crawford and Clemens in their respective roles.
Ted Jr. had himself wondered why Tawney behaved the way she did, but after revelations in a therapy session (the therapist is played by Melinda Page Hamilton, who portrayed Anna Draper — Don Draper’s non-wife but closest friend — in Mad Men), Ted finally sees the light, and that moment of understanding begins to erode the bitter shell of emotions in which he’s encased himself throughout the series. Tawney still doesn’t know who she is — a reality powerfully affirmed in a mesmerizing dream sequence from the season three finale — but we at least know why.
Season three ends with Tawney and Ted still immersed in uncertainty about where their lives are going, with Ted being given a hard-to-take confession from Ted Sr. that he didn’t do all he could to save his first marriage with Ted Jr.’s birth mother, Margaret. Ted Jr. knows that his dad is now struggling in his second marriage as well, but we have seen him become more honest with himself and others, and a lot less inclined to offer knee-jerk condemnations.
Daniel’s journey has been the constant in Rectify, and his journey — which takes him to Nashville in a supervised housing program at the end of the season three finale — is about to take new twists and turns. However, the true forward movement of season three — even more than the work of Sheriff Daggett in breaking this puzzling case, which is substantial — concerns Ted Jr. and Tawney, with the effects certain to ripple through Ted Sr.’s marriage to Janet in season four.
Rectify has achieved this marvelous and unconventional balance in which one man — Daniel — can simultaneously be the centerpiece of the show and yet give way to painstakingly developed sequences involving surrounding characters who are dealing with their own tormented selves.
Indeed, this is the genius of Rectify: We are presented with this broken and confused man — 19 years on death row for a crime he didn’t commit — tossed into society and as bewildered as one would expect him to be. Yet, while that portrait hits us between the eyes, we are slowly and artfully brought to the realization that all the central (non-law-enforcement) characters in the small-town world of the series are trying to confront that which they don’t like about themselves, that which they’re most afraid of in their relationships, that which hurts the most to candidly acknowledge.
It’s a very intimate slice of real life, without over-the-top plot manipulation. Rectify is constantly peeling away the layers of denial, anger and worry which we use to mask that more fundamental feeling we feel so often when traumatic and unjust events hit close to home: sadness. Every central character on this show feels it; every scene is soaked in it, marinated in it. These people are stuck in emotional and spiritual sludge — and true to real life, their daily existences might nudge them an inch or two along the right path, but no further.
Three seasons haven’t wrought transformations in these characters, but they have planted the seeds of renewal in several of them. This is why six or seven more seasons — even with only six episodes — might be so much more satisfying than two or three expanded seasons that run twice as long.
This review has run its course. Now read the season three review (as promised) by Alan Sepinwall.
Here’s hoping that this special television show will be around many more years — years in which it can Rectify the habits of American television viewers.
