‘Outcast’: ‘Demons, Exorcists, and All That’

On the basis of The Walking Dead and now the new Cinemax series Outcast, premiering on Friday night, I’d have to say that Robert Kirkman likes his horror with a brooding, moody edge. I haven’t read the Kirkman-created comic books on which these series are based, but the TV shows that have been made of them both center on a troubled man whose life has been touched by tragedy even as he must fend off supernatural peril. In Dead, it’s Andrew Lincoln’s Sheriff Rick Grimes; in Outcast, it’s Kyle Barnes, played by Patrick Fugit, the star of the 2000 film Almost Famous.

In Outcast, Fugit’s Kyle immediately establishes himself as a haunted fellow with a dark past, alienated from his family and perhaps possessed — whether it’s with special powers, or possession by something evil or good, are questions that hover over the initial hours of the series. What is clear is that something very bad has entered the souls of quite a few citizens in the vicinity of Rome, West Virginia, and a Baptist minister, Reverend Anderson (Philip Glenister) says this is also the case “in every town in this country.”

I hope not, because the opening scene of Outcast is super-creepy and effective. A boy named Joshua (Gabriel Bateman) does something disgusting with a bug crawling up a wall and proceeds to exhibit powers of malevolent destruction. Kyle, Rev. Anderson, and the local police chief, played by House of Cards’ Reg E. Cathey, investigate, and pretty soon we’re deep in Exorcist territory, with bodies levitating, crosses being held out like shields, and some kind of gunk spewing out of the mouths of the possessed.

If Outcast was the first possessed-soul piece of pop culture you’d ever consumed, it would probably strike you as effective. The show is beautifully shot and well-directed, and the premiere’s opening scene with Jacob is truly jolting. But as it proceeds, the series suffers from the context surrounding it: The netherworld is all over TV, in A&E’s just-canceled Damien, on Fox’s Lucifer, and the fall-TV remake of The Exorcist. As a result, Outcast feels overly familiar, something it shakes only in a subplot involving Kyle’s sister, played very well by Wrenn Schmidt (Boardwalk Empire), who has a haunted past of her own.

So there’s little that’s overtly terrible about Outcast — it’s just that, as one character phrases it, the “demons and exorcists and all that” rarely struck me plot-advancers I wanted to pursue with the same alacrity that Kyle pursues his own demons.

Outcast airs Fridays at 10 p.m. on Cinemax.