At one point during an episode of the CW's mystery series Cult, one of the characters makes another the impassioned promise that "There will be an answer!" Given the show's intense love affair with metafiction, I wondered if the line might be a winking acknowledgement that it's only the latest in a long line of post-Lost series that revolves around a slowly unfolding puzzle, a subgenre that from its progenitor on has been long on teases and short on actual answers. I also thought to myself, they better give us that answer in season one because there's no way this thing's going to get picked up again. The end seems to have come sooner than I expected. Yesterday, the CW announced that its slot for the next three Fridays will be filled by reruns of The Carrie Diaries.
Cult's incredibly convoluted central conceit is that in the fictional Cult universe there is a show called Cult about a police officer on a mission to take down Billy Grimm, the charismatic leader of the highly unorthodox religious sect that she was raised in, and that it's spawned a massive, intensely obsessive fan base with a radical wing that essentially worships Grimm as if he were a real-life spiritual leader and has begun to dabble in ritualized murder. Jeff, a journalist, has a mentally ill brother, Nate, who becomes consumed with solving the meta-show's puzzles and disappears under highly suspicious circumstances, leaving behind a crazy-looking trove of research indicating that the Cult cult's responsible. Skye is a production assistant on the meta-show who discovers the so-called True Believers by monitoring the online communities that have sprung up around the show and begins to suspect that its secretive, eccentric executive producer, Stephen Rae (who in a clever extra-meta twist is credited as executive producer of the real Cult), is actively encouraging and guiding them.
Cult had a lot going against it, starting with the fact that explaining the basic plot of the show to someone at a bar takes several minutes and a lot of air-quotes and diagrams, and even then is so complicated that by the time you're done the person you're explaining it to will most likely be totally uninterested in expending the brain power to actually watch it. And being a show on the CW, the cast basically looks like the cast of a CW show, just a little too pretty to be read as actual people, with the exception of Prison Break's Robert Knepper, who plays Grimm, and the continually great Aisha Hinds as the shady detective working to keep Jeff and Skye from discovering the nature of the True Believers.
Lost, ridiculously long and complex theories on What It All Means. It's the nature of modern fandom that we don't just passively consume entertainment anymore; we actively engage with it through remixes. Obsession has become the mainstream. The water-cooler chat about last night's episode has been supplanted by online communities of devotees who don't think it's at all weird that your life revolves around an entertainment property. And when there are people who get so deeply into TV shows and movies that they will, for instance, self-identify as giant alien cat-people, the idea of a group of diehard fans following the instructions of a fictional cult leader isn't so hard to believe.
The real-world Cult doesn't seem to have done much to inspire that kind of devotion. Its apparent cancelation hasn't caused much noise online, and a grassroots campaign to save it (another common feature of modern fandom) doesn't seem very likely. But it had some good ideas, and once you understand the metafictional setup, its central mystery is compelling enough to easily inspire some binge viewing on Hulu. As the geek-culture blog io9 suggests, there could still be a DVD set in the future, or a spot for it in the CW's summer lineup, where we could see how the rest of the season plays out. Which hopefully there will be, because as cheesy as the show could be, it managed to get its hooks in me. And I still want that answer.
Miles Raymer is a writer based in New York City who has contributed to the Chicago Reader, Vice, Pitchfork, and others.