I fail to understand how a series could have such an incredibly well done first season, only to lurch off the rails by the middle-end of second season, and then totally go deep end bonkers by the third (stopped watching a few epi's in). Has to be different writers. It's like the first season writing was replaced with a team whose only experience is in bad soap operas. SO disappointing. The premise, story line development, characters/casting/acting were all amazingly well done Season One. Totally hooked. Then Season 2: starts to come in with too many side stories, never going back to develop/conclude/weave into the rest of the story line..then characters begin to display neuroses by alternating between their previous development and then behaving perplexingly out of character. This is NOT the same thing as developing a nuanced character; the series HAD managed to pull this off in a stellar way Season One. Then all the story lines became overlaid with a healthy dose of tawdry American soap opera on top of it..we the viewer left needing a pad of paper and pen to jot down all the inconsistencies, 180's, unexplained terms left hanging between characters, only to change with no explanation...UGH. SUCH a disappointment.

I love this show. I love how it shows the other side of how cults are on the inside. I could do without some of the odd spiritual stuff, but regardless, it's still a great show. The cast is great too and play their parts well. It really does show a different lifestyle and keeps you interested from start to finish.

The Path centers around a cult in upstate New York with various characters either falling deeper into it or adjusting to life outside of it. Weaving together an impressive number of existing religious practices and mythologies, creator Jessica Goldberg builds an impressively intricate religious world view for her characters from the ground up.At the center of it all is a family torn by various levels of devotion and a leader (Cal, played by Hugh Dancy) who ranks somewhere in the middle echelon of corrupt characters on TV. Part of the the theme is that corruption and shortcuts are hard to avoid when trying to build a big movement under the veneer of behaving with good morals. In this fashion, the show isn't just a political snipe at Scientology (that would be kind of easy) but a richer more universal commentary about all religious organizations and how they can blind people to abuse of power: You stand for good, is it that wrong to throw a little bad into the mix in service of the end goal? The family consists of Eddie (Aaron Paul, who throws himself into the role admirably) who's veering away from religious belief, Sarah (Michelle Monaghan) who's veering closer to the center of the religious power structure, and Hawk (Kyle Miller) who's oscillating between the two ends. They also have a daughter but as of yet (halfway through season 2) she serves no discernible function. It's, again, a situation that can be topically applied to a great many religions where intermarriage is a problem.The use of side characters is also pretty well-placed: Emma Greenwell plays a former drug addict who's going in a journey of the opposite direction of Eddie and trying to rediscover herself in cult life. Similarly, Ali Ahn stands out as Sarah's sister-in-law who slowly pushes for power for her husband in the second season.The show might disappoint if you're looking for something that deals with religion and faith in the way that films like Silence, Seven Years in Tibet or Lost Horizon might. Instead it's about the bureaucracy of religion and the pratfalls of corruption.I didn't find it in the upper echelon of the most engaging things on TV but, for me, it was certainly watchable enough to stick with (it gets significantly more exciting in the second season). Enough ingredients are in place that it could really be someone else's cup of tea though.

I watched this over the course of several days on Hulu, and I enjoyed the gripping drama, but I had to suspend quite a lot of disbelief. As other reviews have pointed out, quite a few logical inconsistencies show up in the series, from some unbelievable character choices to some established facts being contradicted in later episodes. The writers did a wonderful job of keeping my interest in the struggles of these characters to get their crazy lives together. Unfortunately, by the end, it's clear none of them has, and most who seemed to have had some backbone at some point ultimately dropped their spines for the sake of some magical mumbo jumbo. And that's where the real problem of the show comes out. Though the series does a great job of depicting the corrupt and amoral workings of a cult's leadership, the plot's final verdict seems to be that if a cult is nice to people, everything is okay. It's not. Cults are destructive, evil things that should be avoided, ridiculed, and shunned by society at large. Any organization or person who offers magical answers to real life problems is dishonest and cannot be trusted.