A version this article also appeared at Medium.

Sundance TV’s Rectify is Ray McKinnon’s love-letter to the South, and to the dark oddities and weird sadness that creeps beneath the humid summer days, the wide-brimmed hats, the rocking chairs on the verandas, the floral prints, and the “take it easy” hospitality. McKinnon, a very gifted character actor, played Rev. Smith in HBO’s Deadwood and Lincoln “Linc” Potter in FX’s Sons of Anarchy. He’s a goofy lookin’ Southern-fried sonofabitch, and he seems like he would make a great character in one of Flannery O’Connor or William Faulkner’s Southern gothic morality fables.

Instead, and surprisingly so, McKinnon has created one of the best pieces of TV currently available. He made it out of the very universe that birthed the likes of O’Connor and Faulkner. It reminds me of the song “Sodom, South Georgia” by Iron & Wine, or the underbelly of Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird. There is no Atticus Finch in McKinnon’s vision of a southern town during a sleepy Georgia summer. But, much like Lee’s vision, there is an outsider accused of a heinous crime. This time, things are told a bit in reverse. Rectify‘s Daniel Holden, unlike Mockingbird‘s Tom Robinson, has just been released from prison, eighteen years after he had been setnenced on charges of rape and murder.

Daniel Holden is played by Aden Young. He gives the kind of disturbing, earthy performance that demands our attention. I can almost taste, feel, and smell Daniel, and allow me to be perfectly clear, this is not a comfortable experience. There is a very Palahniukian “Fight Club” way in which the cinematographers, Patrick Cady and Paul Sommers, choose to film Daniel’s scenes. Every one of Daniel’s actions demands that the audience watch him and see him in all of his uncomfortable, unsettling, disturbed glory. Daniel is 37 years old and has just been released from death row for a crime he was convicted of when he was only 18 — the rape and murder of his high school girlfriend Hannah. New DNA evidence has suggested that it wasn’t Daniel’s semen on the body, but this doesn’t answer the question of whether or not Daniel killed Hannah 19 years ago. Daniel’s hometown is not prepared for his return. Young gives Daniel a lazy eye, a slow tongue, and a strange gait that makes him a startling figure. His child-like view of the world reminds me of Lenny from Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men, sweet and kind but, ultimately, dangerous.

There is an episode in Season One in which Daniel, freshly released from prison, is in his brand new bedroom. Daniel’s sister Amantha (Abigail Spencer), a gorgeous Southern belle with plenty of grit, is determined to get Daniel out of the house and into the world with her. She has her mind set to take her estranged brother to the local petting zoo for the day. Instead, Daniel finds himself fascinated by the amount of space he has in his new bedroom, by the feel of the blankets on his shirtless torso, and how the mattress springs make him bounce. It’s as if he is being reintroduced to his own body. The day before this scene, Daniel’s younger, arrogant, hot-headed step-brother Ted had shamed him for being raped by fellow male prisoners. He gives Daniel a porn magazine and convinces him that he can “get himself right” if he masturbates to these pictures of women. Daniel spends the next day learning how to masturbate to these pictures. It’s an unsettling scene, but, it’s not because it’s dirty. It’s unsettling because it’s all rooted in innocent and desperate curiosity. Should we be disgusted? I almost wanted to look away and give Daniel his sacred private time.

The scene of Daniel’s masturbation and bodily awareness is the “dirty” mirror image of a scene toward the end of Season One. Daniel has been convinced, by his young sister-in-law Tawney, played brilliantly by Adelaide Clemens (HBO/BBC’s Parade’s End), to go through with a baptism and “give his heart to Jesus.” As Tawney says excitedly to her disgusted husband Ted, “Daniel’s gon’ be saved!” The baptism of the Deep South feels less like a deeply historical, liturgical, and theological tradition within the Christian Church, but rather some kind of earthy, dusty folk magic. The scene in which Daniel steps into the baptismal pool (I am a Lutheran and accustomed to a light sprinkling of water on the forehead, but, I was baptized at the age of 17 in a large pool by full immersion in a tradition not unlike Daniel’s. It is a surreal experience, to be certain.) shows us, yet again, a curious, child-like man attempting to figure out what his body should and should not do. The baptism takes on a masturbatory significance when we realize that both Daniel’s practice of jerking off and getting dunked are both described to him as acts of salvation.

McKinnon’s religion of the South, much like Flannery O’Connor’s in “Wise Blood,” is one of grotesque incarnation. We, the audience, are not spared the flesh and bone reality of sin in the midst of the sacred. McKinnon, just like his spiritual predecessors, is affecting his audience by asking, simply by virtue of Daniel Holden’s presence on the screen, that we consider our mortality and our own “condition,” so to speak. That being said, Sundance TV’s Rectify, while well worth it and fucking fascinating, is not for those looking for happy, “up-lifting” and family friendly television. Rectify is almost anti-binge worthy. Take it in, one episode at a time, and let the sleepy, secret-filled South of McKinnon’s Rectify work its earthy magic over you.

Josiah Richard Armstrong is a hospital chaplain from Western New York. He is also a playwright and amateur cartoonist. Follow him on Twitter @JosiahArmstrong and Medium, where he writes more reviews for film and television.