In the US: Tuesdays, 9pm ET/8pm CT, The CW In the UK: Mysteriously acquired by an unnamed network
Cults are really big right now on TV. The Following is on Fox and now we have Cult on The CW. Intriguingly, both shows were thought up years ago, The Following as the script for Scream 3 and Cult as a show for the now-defunct predecessor to The CW, The WB.
The two shows both have good pedigrees. The Following comes from long-time writer Kevin Williamson (Dawson’s Creek and The Vampire Diaries) but Cult comes from the even older pen of Rockne S O’Bannon, who started out on The (New) Twilight Zone, before going on to create Farscape, Alien Nation and seaQuest DSV.
So perhaps it’s appropriate that Cult is a trickier, more knowing beast than The Following. The Following, of course, has all kinds of degrees of Scream-esque meta, but Cult takes things a step further. It begins seemingly as a somewhat stupid, tacky The CW show in which a young blonde cop, Kelly Collins, (Alona Tal) and an older, fatter, blacker cop have to investigate the cult run by Billy Grimm (Robert Knepper) to which Collins used to belong.
But just as they find somewhat buried in a wall and he utters the somewhat ludicrous and unfathomable “‘Well hey. These things just snap right off,” we discover we’ve been watching a TV show within a TV show. Collins is really actress Marti Gerritsen and Knepper is actor Roger Reeves and they star in The CW’s Cult.
With me so far? Good. Anyway, so far, so Pulaski/30 Rock. But rather than being a spoof or send up of the making of a TV show, Cult is a far darker creation that focuses on the nature of cult television and its fans. This Cult has fans and it’s created web sites and all kinds of other clues for them to seek out to discover more about the show. Except perhaps it’s not all fiction. Because when one fan seems to work it all out, he disappears. When his journalist brother Jeff Dean Sefton (Matthew Davis) comes looking for him, he starts to discover the same messages in the show that his brother did, and with the help of a researcher on the show, Skye Yarrow (Jessica Lucas), they begin to investigate Cult, to see if they can find out what’s really going on and what’s happened to his brother.
Here’s a trailer that gives away all the good bits from the first episode.
There’s a possibility the Daily News won’t be around tomorrow, since it might be celebrating its wife’s birthday (if she’s awake). Check in tomorrow to find out.
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