My wife was scrolling through Netflix on Sunday and landed on Rectify, and before I knew it we had accidentally watched 17 of the 30 episodes over again.
I am, generally speaking, not a big fan of rewatching stuff I've already seen, but this show makes me think & feel about so many different things. There's also maybe no other show that gets my wife and I talking about characters' inner lives the way this one does. Just so beautifully crafted. We're in Season 3 now, and up until this point, Amantha's landlord Melvin has only appeared in 2 scenes (and only has a handful more in the series, if I remember correctly). In his second scene of the show, which can't last more than 5 minutes, he says "I didn't know if I should come, but...regrets grow tiresome." Literally the only other things you know about this man are that a) Daniel cared for his turtles when they were kids, b) he's a landlord now, and c) he feels compassion for the Holdens. That's it. But based on nothing more than the actor's delivery of that line, you can sketch in a whole life story for this man in the small town of Paulie, Georgia. Even the smallest roles in this show were given just enough detail to help you believe that they were all complicated people with their own stories and pasts.
My original watch of this show was a season at a time over the course of 3-4 years, and the first time through I really focused on the slow, meditative aspects of it. Watching a little over 2 seasons in 2 days makes it feel much more compressed and makes the few violent incidents of the show seem more common than they are. The internal timeline of the show follows a very short period after Daniel's release from prison, but as a viewer I think I got more out of the first time when it had some time to breathe and just live in my mind between seasons.
I still think the show's most impressive feat is the way it shades in Teddy Jr. in so many unexpected ways; I'm at the halfway point of his story now and can't wait to see if I feel the same way after a second watch. What's more clear to me this time is that Janet was a wonderful character too, and I wish we got to see more of her interacting with the world outside of just her family.
I have a real soft spot for stories that find profundity in the mundane, and I think what gets me about Rectify is the concept that to a man who has been locked away with a literal death sentence hanging over him, everything in the world actually is profound. Daniel mentions Plato's Allegory of the Cave early in the series, and it's interesting to use that as a lens to rewatch the series as a whole: Daniel is really encountering the real world, in stages, for the first time.
I could talk about this show all day.
