As a family drama, “” is very good. As an appraisal of belief, it’s extraordinary.Jessica Goldberg’s drama — the streaming company’s inaugural hourlong series — has already been delivering nuanced relationship narratives for two seasons, primarily focusing on the central love triangle between Eddie Lane (Aaron Paul), Sarah Lane (Michelle Monaghan), and Cal Roberts (Hugh Dancy). In this realm alone, “The Path” has been consistently compelling. Dancy may not be getting the buzz he did for “Hannibal,” but he’s doing work of equal magnitude. Paul is so strong as an exasperated father, husband, and leader, while Monaghan confidently pushes Sarah from moments of the utmost fragility to places of fierce conviction.How far Goldberg and her writing staff has taken each character is impressive (not to mention the rest of the cast), but the scope of “The Path” keeps widening beyond family, and in the first six episodes of Season 3, it’s tackling head-on the very thing it claimed not to be: a cult.

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If that word piques your interest, then Season 3 is what you’ve been waiting for; it’s not that Meyerism — the faith created by Dr. Stephen Meyer and followed by Eddie, Sarah, Cal — has changed so much as it’s grown. Season 3 goes big and gets there fast: A tragedy and a miracle make up the first two scenes, the latter of which leads to more worldwide exposure for the movement and thus more scrutiny from the public.And “scrutiny” is the key word, there, because everyone sees Meyerism as a cult: The season delves into the challenges facing a new religion trying to establish itself in a world that’s so tied to old beliefs, it’s instinctively cynical toward new ones. “The Path” doesn’t argue that such skepticism is unearned — cults are very real and very dangerous — but the association of a cult has always haunted Meyerism, and they’ve never seen the ramifications they do this season.The choice to engage with the perception of cults in 2018 brings back fond memories of yesteryear. Eddie Lane’s defiant roar from Season 1 is hard to forget — and who would want to? An agitated Aaron Paul is an excellent Aaron Paul, but the series also stood by his claim. Meyerism is a movement, it’s not a cult.

And in the first two seasons, “The Path” dealt with Meyerism on its own terms.Eddie wrestled with his faith and nearly lost his family because of his doubts. He did lose Sarah — or Sarah lost him, depending on when you think their bond was broken — and she subsequently broke her moral rules in order to protect the movement. Cal, meanwhile, has always been the wild card: He’s killed for the cause, and he’s often motivated by pure and passionate self-aggrandizement. He wants to believe so fiercely, but his faith is often clouded by selfish desires.

In other words, “The Path” used a made-up movement to illustrate the challenges and complications of a life dedicated to faith. Its parallels weren’t relegated to fringe religions you hear about on the news or read about in the tabloids. Meyerism was rooted in benevolence. Its intentions were pure. Its practice had all the right ideas in mind.Corruption comes from within — from the flawed human beings striving to be better — but it’s deeper than that in Season 3. A major revelation in the early episodes rocks the movement and the series’ foundation; it’s a bold development and one that opens up the series to relevant real-world parallels. It’s tough to say more without giving away the twist, but it’s worth noting how it could’ve sent the show spiraling into soap, and instead, only gave it more power.The Meyerism movement has always been intriguing because it’s not an evil organization.

“The Path” has always been intriguing because it’s not about evil cults — like, say, an unnamed “religion” with a few very famous Hollywood faces. For as much lurid fascination as that kind of show would provide, Goldberg’s drama isn’t a masked attack on specific cults or cults in general; it’s an honest assessment of faith in the 21st century. Right now, one of the challenges facing Meyerism is that outsiders automatically assume any “movement” with money, members, and “strange” practices is probably a cult, so these characters have to deal with the association in frightening ways.It’s an excellent way to engage with a topic always lurking around “The Path,” but the series isn’t merely relenting to an association it’s been facing since Day 1.

Season 3 asks us to separate fact from fiction; to look beyond easy labels and examine what’s really going on; it asks for trust from a world where that’s justifiably suspicious. Now is not a time in which a new faith could easily survive, if at all, and cult-related questions evoke problems within the movement.

They affect each character’s faith. Sarah and Cal, especially, have to look at their past in relation to Meyerism and what’s driving their conviction to it, while Eddie struggles to get his message out because everyone thinks he’s a cult leader.Eddie’s response still rings true: Meyerism is not a fucking cult. But abductive reasoning demands he finish the sentence: If it looks like a cult and acts like a cult, then what? Is the world wrong, or is Eddie ignoring a problem? His struggle is our gain, as “The Path” Season 3 remains one helluva walk. Get to steppin’.

F1 2000 finishing kit. Grade: A-“The Path” Season 3 premieres Wednesday, January 17 on Hulu. The first three episodes are streaming now, with new episodes every Wednesday.Sign Up.

The very real struggles of belief and faith, no matter which denomination, or even intended lack of denomination, are not alien to television. If you want to whittle it all down, is about faith in humanity and society against all likelihood. The Young Pope, considers the balance between motions towards the sublimity of the afterlife and the petty, enormously satisfying human acts and gripes that drive a radical spiritual leader. Meanwhile, on the big screen, Martin Scorsese‘s may be the most important religious film of the decade for its simultaneous ecstatic celebration of the uniting force of faith and its sober, direct criticism of the self-serving nature of all religions. Image via HuluCults are also not completely unrepresented on television either, whether you point toward Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt or a variety of episodes of The X-Files and random crime procedurals, from the Law & Orders to the CSIs.

Part of the drama of Hulu’s is the difference between a religion, a cult, and a scheme, and how sometimes all three are accurate describers for movements like Meyerism, the central belief system of The Path. What drives someone to give their will over completely to a belief system?

Do you struggle? Does that struggle signify something greater, or the lack thereof?

The questions are innumerable but if any of these queries were in the minds of The Path‘s creative team, it doesn’t translate on screen.Instead, The Path comes off as a vaguely menacing, largely repetitive soap opera centered around a made-up spiritual movement that is in the midst of expanding. In the first season, Hugh Dancy‘s Cal clashed with the higher-ups of Meyerism over the direction, eventually tipping over to violence in more than one instance. Now that he seems to be the ipso-facto leader of the movement, his aggressive plan for expansion, including an expensive building in a prime lot of Manhattan real estate, has become the center of the show’s focus. Even in the tense scene when Cal bids for the lot, there’s little love or attention given towards the ceremony, the surroundings, or even the other people. The sequence is written and filmed with a starched plainness, driven by the obvious goal of imparting a major plot point and reconfirming Cal’s disturbing competitive streak.With Eddie ( Aaron Paul, also a producer here) now out of the movement and back in the world with a construction gig, the series attempts to express the joys of being out on one’s own, with no schedule and no wife. In the first episode, Eddie makes a point of inviting himself to an after-work trip to the local bar, only a day or two after meeting back up with an attractive, single woman who he used to go to high school with years ago. Rather than attempting to show the buds of kinship, the bonding of colleagues, the show quickly turns attention back to the possible rekindled flame.

The dialogue is constantly leading the audience by the nose and never lingers for too long in an exchange or in a moment of quiet reflection or revelation. Image via HuluThe gears of the storytelling are readily apparent at every turn, and the show does not do much visually to distract from that or offer a counter-argument to the rigid words. Meyerism is defined by the glory of “the Light,” and even in this, the show feels brazenly unimaginative. Even if you were to disagree or ignore that sentiment, however, the series rarely makes visual allusions to the grace, beauty, or strangeness of the proposed belief system. The show is too comfortable in its competence to fully convey the fury of inner feelings that Eddie or, more importantly, Sarah (a never-better Michelle Monaghan), his separated wife and Meyerism honcho, nor do the directors or writers allude much to the burgeoning feelings and emotions they have for their faith, its tenants, and its presumed rewards. In this, the series misses a major part of what makes faith fascinating: why do people stay, even in times of crisis, embarrassment, or shame?Ultimately, the series is more interested in rote psychological matters, matters of matrimonial discord, and arguably the most boring teenagers in the history of written television. Kyle Allen‘s Hawk was a compelling figure in Season 1, both the encapsulation of bottled-up teen angst and a believable, do-good man trying to figure himself out.

In Season 2, he’s relegated to a droning romantic relationship that offers little insight into young desire and even less intimacy in exploring the character in vulnerable moments. Every vaguely political matter that is brought up is used as window dressing, including when the Meyerists must consider entering the political arena by backing the victims of a local water-polluting scandal. Add all of this with the already convoluted infighting melodrama in the Meyerism movement, as well as an increasingly perfunctory undercover-agent storyline involving Rockmond Dunbar‘s Abe, and each episode feels at once annoyingly placid in style and congested with over-plotting. Image via HuluThe cast deserves little to no blame in the disappointing innocuousness of The Path; the little intrigue the series offers comes almost exclusively from their presence and natural sense of innovation.

The directors deserves some credit for giving Dancy, Paul, Monaghan, and the rest of the cast the support to perform so confidently, and the show never feels anything less thanprofessional. For a show that’s considering some of the biggest philosophical, psychological, and societal questions of our day, and of any day really, The Path lacks a feeling of risk, a palpable sense of walking the plank of faith along with the long-blind Meyerists in some way. There’s no such potency coming off of the second season of The Path, which trades in a flimsy feeling of being grounded for the wild complexities of the universe and the mind.The Path Season 2 is available for streaming in full starting January 25th on Hulu.Rating: ★★ – Same As It Ever Was.