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Why Aren't You Watching This Show?! By
Sundi

Rectify Airs Mondays at 10pm on Sundance
There is this quiet little show on the Sundance channel that
is moving me every Monday night.
Rectify, written by
Ray McKinnon, is about as earnest and rich as anything that
is airing right now. Gritty
and edgy as an indie film, but nuanced and complex, I am
smitten with every character, every camera angle, every line
of dialogue, every...single...thing. The show is riveting
because it has a voyeuristic quality that makes me feel like
I have my face pressed to the characters’ family room
window.
Rectify is about
Daniel Holden, who has been on death row for 19 years for
the rape and murder of his high school girlfriend. The
verdict is overturned when new DNA evidence surfaces, yet he
is not fully exonerated. This is an important detail,
because, even after six episodes, I still can’t decide if
Daniel is innocent or not. The exposition is doled out in
tidbits that offer fragmented and distorted versions of the
actions of the past, mixing up the picture of anything that
happened before the show picked up in the first episode.
While this can get frustrating at times, I suffer this
teasing because I am so intrigued by these characters and
the magic that happens in the stillness; when they exchange
glances, sigh, gesture, touch..
The arc of the first six episodes is so tightly focused on
the minutia of Daniel and his family’s readjustment, that it
is hard to reconcile the horrible crime he is accused of. In
fact, the story is soft-pedalled in a way that makes the
flashbacks to death row exponentially disturbing. Daniel, is
grappling with the new way in which time passes. The actor
who plays Daniel, Aden Young, has mastered the ambiguous
subtlety that makes me want to weep for Daniel’s loss. It
plays out so incrementally on Daniel’s face that his
sincerity goes straight through you. The melancholy in this
show is so well-crafted that it becomes part of the
fundamental makeup of the show; becoming self-aware with
lines like, “It’s the beauty that hurts you the most, son,
not the ugly.”
However; once you step away from the excruciatingly
beautiful details, it is hard to ignore the powerful
thematics. As much as this show is about the individuals, it
is about time, loss, vision and most importantly, loss.
These converge in a scene in which Daniel visits Walmart for
the first time; it is most apparent how much he has lost as
he wanders the aisles assessing the newness of of the world.
Its like watching Daniel see the world for the first time
and it is such an intimate and poignant moment I have to
force myself not to look away. It is scenes like this that
strip away all the moral expectations associated with the
crime he is accused of, and forces me to see the man for
what he is.... human.
Rectify is set in
Paulding County, Georgia, and shows set in the South often
present problems for me. I am always hopeful that a show
will get it right and not make caricatures of Southerners. I
believe this show does pretty well. The accents and dialect
resonate and the family dynamics strike just the right
chord. The show answers the negativity by being fiercely
intellectual; Daniel quotes Aristotle, Flannery O’Connor AND
Thomas Aquinas for God’s sake. Even the archetypes are
handled with a deft hand, and the show is careful not to
define itself by its setting. I admire the characters’ close
study of the accents and the writers’ honoring the culture;
it could have gone a completely different way, but I am more
than pleased with its trajectory so far. YOU SHOULD BE
WATCHING THIS SHOW!!!
The opinions in these articles are those of the writer and do not
necessarily reflect the opinions of The TV MegaSite or its other volunteers.
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