Driving by his deep will of clearing the town from the corruption and corrupted figures in the church, Davenport, a young honest and kind preacher of a small town in America, who prepares a protest against the country and other clerks, the thing that risks his life, as a businessman hires a villain to stop the protest by any mean.
As the series progresses, you'll find characters linked to each other in ways that might seem unexpected -- or just plain contrived. Still, the show's many swerves make it hard to turn away.
Slow-moving and enamored of its own darkness as Damnation is, there's something vital and real in the show's insistence that the United States' institutions have failed and are only looking out for themselves.
Damnation has enough mystery and action to stick around to find out. If you're looking for something along the lines of Hell on Wheels, the USA series might do.
The result is a bracing look backward informed by present-day parallels, in another show that feels like an outlier for USA -- one that should have critical admirers but might struggle to satisfy TV's capitalist demands.
The series' biggest flaw is conflating serious television with misery - drama can and should also handle joy. Damnation prefers to meditate only on the turds, symbolic or otherwise.
Modern relevance and a few good performances are all it has to recommend. It's too often dull, tonally inconsistent, and just poorly written. All the modern political parallels in the world won't matter if the viewer is bored.
