The new Hulu series “The Path” follows a group of people who have committed their lives to the spiritual teachings known as “The Meyerist Movement.”
It’s not exactly a cult, not exactly a religion, but it makes for an interesting premise for a TV show. Series creator Jessica Goldberg launched her career as a playwright, but eventually started working in television, most recently writing for the NBC show “Parenthood.” Hulu's “The Path” is the first series she’s created.
The Frame's John Horn spoke with Goldberg about creating a fictional religious movement and what inspired her to make the show.
INTERVIEW HIGHLIGHTS
I grew up in Woodstock. At that time, in the '70s, it was a community with a lot of seekers. We had people who followed the Rajneesh, we had people who were Sufi, and I was always taken by people seeking to have lives of meaning through faith. So when I went to build my own religion, I pulled a lot from Eastern religions, but I have to say that there's a lot of Catholicism in there, there's a lot of Christianity in there.
I feel like the base of most religions is quiet beautiful — like the basic message — and it's the people who corrupt them. When we got a writers' room together, we really pulled from all different religions, but we tried to make something sort of beautiful at the base of it.
There's a scene in the show where the leader of the group, played by Hugh Dancy, is preaching to his followers and he talks about Plato's "Allegory of the Cave." What inspired you to use this as a reference point in the show?
Well, it was actually the leaping off point for the show. I had... lost my frame at one point in my life, like within a year I got divorced and my father died, and I just had this moment where I was at the farmer's market with my daughter and it all just left like shadows. Everything just seemed like bullshit. I think because I had grown up without a system for what happens when you lose your way, I became sort of obsessed with, at that time, What if I had one?
So I kept thinking of Plato's "Allegory of the Cave." Writing is sort of mysterious, you don't know how you get from point A to point B exactly, but it was a world that I wanted to write about.
Even though you're making up a fictional religion or movement, as you're thinking about the components that make up the movement, are you finding some personal answers to what sounded like a spiritual crisis that you were undergoing?
I think so. For me, writing ends up being a frame, so I was so lucky that I got to be — for three years — in this project, and that has become a way out of whatever existential crisis I was in then.
"The Path" debuts on Hulu on March 30.