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The devil goes down to Georgia in the horror comedy series \u201cThe Bondsman,\u201d but he\u2019s not looking for a fiddle fight. This demon master is actually an old-school telemarketer, fax machine at the ready, overseeing a pyramid scheme of lost souls. And when he taps you on the shoulder, you\u2019d best be ready to do his handiwork.<\/p>\n
A gory, tongue-in-cheek slice of Southern Gothic, the new Amazon Prime Video series, premiering Thursday, presents a system of penance that borders on bureaucracy. A rural Georgia bondsman named Hub Halloran (Kevin Bacon) stumbles into the scheme in the first episode, when his throat gets slit in the line of duty. Coming to with a gaping wound in his neck, he soon realizes that he has been to hell and it has spit him back up. He\u2019s still a bondsman, but now his job is to track down demons that have escaped from hell. If he refuses, he gets sent back.<\/p>\n
In a TV landscape offering no shortage of horror in recent years, \u201cThe Bondsman\u201d has a folksier flavor than most. The show\u2019s haunts are rural; the main characters are scared and surprised by the demons they encounter, but they also just seem inconvenienced and perturbed by the whole affair.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe operational theory is like, \u2018Well, hell, I was going to go grocery shopping today, and instead, I\u2019ve got to deal with a demon on the loose in my small town,\u2019\u201d said Erik Oleson, the showrunner. \u201cIt\u2019s just one more of those things that the system keeps sticking on you.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
The system, in this case, is represented by Pot O\u2019 Gold, which presents itself as a tenacious series of pop-up ads and voice mail messages offering one of those opportunities that you just shouldn\u2019t pass up. The company logo is a jovial leprechaun. The boss is the devil himself, though he\u2019s too busy to make himself seen; instead he sends a very cheerful, un-devilish minion (Jolene Purdy) to give Hub his new assignment.<\/p>\n
Hub is skeptical, though he notices that his slashed throat, which he initially covered up with duct tape, seems to have magically healed. Soon he\u2019s off to hunt down demons, armed with a variety of weapons (shotgun, chain saw), and Kitty, his spitfire mama (Beth Grant) by his side.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe Bondsman\u201d was created by Grainger David, a soft-spoken former journalist for Fortune who grew up in Atlanta and South Carolina. He studied literature at Princeton, where he immersed himself in Southern Gothic writers like Flannery O\u2019Connor.<\/p>\n
In an interview, David citied a line from O\u2019Connor\u2019s short story \u201cA Good Man Is Hard to Find\u201d: \u201cShe would of been a good woman \u2026 if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.\u201d Hub, David said, \u201ccould have been a good man if there\u2019d just been a demon around every minute of his life. He\u2019s someone who made so many mistakes and was just screwing up. And then finally here at the end, he sort of gets a second chance.\u201d<\/p>\n
In short, Hub had demons to wrestle with well before he died and came back. He was a lousy husband (though a pretty good country music collaborator) to his ex-wife, Maryanne (the singer-songwriter Jennifer Nettles), and an inattentive father to his teenage son, Cade (Maxwell Jenkins). Both have now taken up with a carpetbagging Boston gangster (Damon Herriman) who is looking for his own redemption, though not very hard.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
Hub isn\u2019t a terribly nice guy, but, as played by Bacon and written by David, he has the impish swagger of a man who doesn\u2019t realize he\u2019s in over his head \u2014 or, in this case, enslaved by the big boss down below. Plus, his mother is always there to knock him down a peg or two, or help him with his new gig.<\/p>\n
\u201cOn the one hand Hub is kind of the quintessential ideal of American manhood,\u201d Bacon said. \u201cHe\u2019s kind of a loner and lives hard and all that stuff, but he\u2019s still very much of a mama\u2019s boy. I found that very funny.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThe Bondsman\u201d arrives under the production banner of Blumhouse, which has a prolific track record in horror for both big screen (\u201cGet Out,\u201d \u201dThe Invisible Man\u201d) and small (\u201cInto the Dark,\u201d \u201cSacred Lies\u201d). Earlier Blumhouse productions have blended horror and comedy, but Jason Blum, the company\u2019s founder and an executive producer on \u201cThe Bondsman,\u201d said the results have been mixed.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
\u201cWe\u2019ve done some horror comedies; sometimes we get it right, and sometimes we get it wrong,\u201d Blum said. \u201cUsually when I read them, I don\u2019t like them because the comedy takes away from the horror and the horror takes away from the comedy. In this show I feel like they really complement each other, and that\u2019s very tricky to do.\u201d<\/p>\n
Macabre stories have always been part of TV, with creepy series like \u201cThe Twilight Zone\u201d and \u201cAlfred Hitchcock Presents\u201d being early hits and others, including \u201cThe X-Files\u201d and \u201cBuffy the Vampire Slayer,\u201d becoming beloved shows. But this century the small screen has provided a more consistent home for capital-H horror, with showrunners using cinematic effects and gruesome gore to deliver jump scares<\/a> to people\u2019s living rooms. This movement has yielded an impressive range of frights.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Some series, including \u201cThe Walking Dead,\u201d Ryan Murphy\u2019s \u201cAmerican Horror Story\u201d and the Duffer brothers\u2019 \u201cStranger Things,\u201d have become reliable franchises with fervent fan bases. Mike Flanagan<\/a> has tapped a more literary, introspective vein with the likes of \u201cMidnight Mass\u201d and \u201cThe Haunting of Hill House.\u201d TV horror has also made space for Afrofuturism and commentary on racism in American history, with \u201cLovecraft Country.\u201d<\/p>\n The creative team behind \u201cThe Bondsman\u201d agrees that television horror is more difficult to craft than the movie kind. \u201cWith a movie you have more time to set up the jump scares that an audience wants,\u201d Blum said.<\/p>\n Grainger added: \u201cMovie horror really wants to be meticulous and drawn out. It needs time in order for the audience to really get into that mind set of dread. This is a little bit different because of the more compressed time structure, and also because the comedy wants to resist that kind of elongated ramp.\u201d<\/p>\n The 30-minute episodes of \u201cThe Bondsman\u201d amp up the mayhem quotient with concentrated doses of demonic frenzy. This somehow makes everything a little funnier, with outrageous setups and gory set pieces pushing at the edges of every episode.<\/p>\n Factor in the cross-genre pollinating and you get a relentless adrenaline blast, a work of sensation more concerned with providing quick jolts than winding back stories.<\/p>\n \u201cWe really just wanted to make a crazy mash-up of horror and action and family dramedy and music,\u201d Oleson said. \u201cJust make it a fun ride, and hopefully at the end of the show, people have this stupid grin on their face and they\u2019re like, \u2018What the [expletive] was that<\/em>?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n