The Mesmerizing Rhythm of Sundance Channel’s "Rectify" | TV/Streaming

The log line is deceptively simple: A former death row inmate named Daniel Holden (Aden Young), who may have been wrongly convicted, comes home. In the first season, Daniel struggled to assimilate back into society, often conveying the attitude and naïvete of a teenager. He was an adolescent stuck in the time in which his life was forever altered. Those around him struggled along the spectrum of support and apprehension, including loving-but-uncertain sister Amantha (the amazing Abigail Spencer), Daniel’s suspicious stepbrother Ted Jr. (Clayne Crawford), and the woman to whom Daniel seemed most drawn, Ted Jr.’s religious wife Tawney (Adelaide Clemens). Locals were equally torn over Daniel’s return and the end of the first season saw Daniel beaten nearly to death.

In the season premiere, “Running with the Bull,” Daniel spends the episode in a limbo state between life and death, hovering there as he lies in a coma in the real world. Daniel converses with Kerwin Whitman (Johnny Ray Gill), who we learned last season through flashbacks was a death row inmate he befriended, and the two discuss whether or not Daniel wants to return to the land of the living. It’s a tough construct to pull off without sounding overwritten, and there are passages of it that do feel scripted. However, “Rectify” is a show that earns its philosophical conversations through the context of its situations. Aiden is a man-child dealing with the feelings that most of us processed in adolescence and our 20s in one week.

And that’s another brilliant construct of “Rectify.” It’s revealed in the second-season premiere that Aiden has only been out of jail a week when he’s put back in a coma. And, of course, the show picks up there this year. We’re often accustomed to programs that leap forward through large chunks of time but “Rectify” is a methodical piece about conversations and moments more than a sprawling narrative. Episodes often take place over only a couple of hours, allowing focus on character more than a driving plot.