‘The Path’: Inside Hulu’s Bold New Cult Drama
The first thing you notice is the Eye, a tribal rendering of an orb that resembles a sun inside the middle of a circle. It’s virtually everywhere: etched in wood outside meeting halls and headquarter offices, hanging framed on walls inside homes and prison-like “isolation” cells, adorning everything from communal teepees to recruitment pamphlets. The Aztec-like symbol is the mark of Meyerism, a controversial religious movement based in upstate New York; some might call it a cult. “It’s the idea that ‘your eyes have been opened, and now you’ve seen the truth,'” says Jessica Goldberg, the playwright and TV writer responsible for dreaming up the fictional faith’s omnipresent logo. “But it’s also: You’re being watched. You’re always being watched.”
Enlightenment and paranoia — that’s the duality at the center of Hulu’s new drama The Path, which drops viewers into an on-the-fringe spiritual community complete with an enigmatic founder and mystic mumbo-jumbo jargon. Specifically, it follows three Meyerists in crisis: Cal (Hugh Dancy), a high-ranking lieutenant in a power struggle to become the public face of the organization; Eddie (Aaron Paul), who’s belief system is shaken after a disturbing, hallucinogenic vision on a retreat; and his wife Sarah (Michelle Monaghan), a lifelong member who thinks the outside world is corrupting her son and is confused by her spouse’s sudden remoteness. In many ways, the trio could be anybody dealing with modern life, insecurity, bad choices and a broken marriage. They just happen to belong to a growing “religious” organization perched on a slippery moral slope that doesn’t take kindly to having its tenets questioned. (The first two episodes premiered on the streaming service Wednesday night; the rest of the series will be doled out one episode a week.)
“I mean, I had a childhood fascination with alternative social experiments,” Goldberg says. “I grew up in Woodstock, and there were a lot of hippies around still. Every block had a crystal shop; my boss at the video store I worked at was a Jewish man who had become a Sufi. It wasn’t like I was intent on writing a show about cults. But there was a point recently where, within a year, I lost my dad and got divorced, and suddenly had this huge existential crisis. What happens when one day you look at your life, and you don’t believe in it anymore? I needed a frame to talk about these things — and that’s when I just started inventing this heightened world.”
She wrote the pilot on the sly, eventually taking the completed script to Jason Katims, the executive producer behind shows such as Boston Public, Friday Night Lights and Parenthood, for feedback; the next thing she knew, he’d signed on as well. Once they started shopping around the idea, however, they were were met with blank stares. “Look, it’s not an easy sell,” Goldberg says, laughing. “People hear the word cult and they run to the hills. But Hulu had gotten a hold of my script, they knew Jason could put together a show, and I think they wanted to make their mark in terms of edgy programming. To have a network say like, ‘Be bold, be weird, let people be ugly. Slow things down. It’s okay if things are slow’ … this is what you want to hear as a writer.”
‘The Path’: Inside Hulu’s Bold New Cult Drama, Page 1 of 3