Hap and Leonard is one of TV’s best-kept secrets

Hap and Leonard is my favorite kind of TV show — one that bites off more than it can chew, then insists, through muffled mouth, that it’s doing just fine, and no, it doesn’t need a drink of water. Even in the seasons of the show that don’t come together for me, I enjoy watching it try to swallow.

The Sundance series, whose third season debuts tonight, is based on a series of crime thrillers written by Joe Lansdale. Set in the late 1980s in East Texas, each season adapts a new novel in which best pals Hap (James Purefoy) and Leonard (Michael K. Williams) unpack America’s rich, tortured history of seedy deals gone wrong, Vietnam War hangovers, and racial animosity.

The show might swerve into heartfelt drama, or wild comedy, or two-fisted action, or strange magical realism at any given moment. It feels haunted by ghosts, because America is haunted by ghosts it tries to pretend aren’t there. But between the two of them, Hap and Leonard can see all of those phantoms.

The third season, based on Lansdale’s The Two-Bear Mambo, sends the two out to a little town run by the Klan around Christmastime in 1989, in search of Leonard’s lawyer, Florida (Tiffany Mack), who also just happens to be Hap’s ex. She was trying to make a deal to sell a long-lost record by a legendary blues musician, on behalf of one of the musician’s descendants. But as a black woman in a town run by the Klan, she was also in grave danger, which makes her disappearance all the more concerning.

That might sound like the foundation of a serious consideration of how America’s supposedly abolished racist legacy, shown in full force by organizations like the Klan, exists even when too many of us try to consign it to the past. But every time you think you have Hap and Leonard pegged, it heads off toward something different. It’s pulp, but with its head firmly on its shoulders.

Truth be told, the Klan stuff doesn’t always work in The Two-Bear Mambo. I’ve seen four of the season’s six episodes, and it’s only in the fourth of those episodes (largely told from the point of view of Florida in flashback) that the Klansmen of the little town become real threats, rather than the sort of obvious racist caricatures who make sure to advertise their racism by spouting slurs and trying to enforce segregation even though it’s no longer legal, allowing viewers to think, boy, glad racism is over.

This is of a piece with Hap and Leonard, however, because the show tries to juggle so many different elements and has but six episodes in which to pull them off. More successful are the scenes where Hap and Leonard are forced to reckon with the way that race ultimately defines their friendship in certain contexts, as when Leonard lets Hap know there’s no way he’ll let his white friend accompany him to a black part of town because the folks living there would clam up once they saw Hap’s Caucasian face, or when he teases Hap about how he can afford to be carefree some of the time, simply by virtue of his skin color.

What’s more interesting is when Hap and Leonard lets all of these elements of its stew (including the fact that Hap was once in a frowned-upon interracial relationship with Florida, or that Leonard is gay) season each other, which is to say that sometimes the best depiction of the horrors of institutional racism is a thoughtful discussion, and sometimes it’s trapping our heroes between gun-toting Klansmen and a literal freight train. That Hap and Leonard can (usually) pull both off is to its credit.

But if you’re not really interested in the series’ depiction of racism, there’s ample enjoyment to be found elsewhere in Hap and Leonard. Indie horror director Jim Mickle has given the series a distinctive look, in which everything that happens is “real,” but imbued with a spooky, supernatural feel — especially at night — in the form of mists rising off the ground, torrential rains, or just the way human habitation sometimes seems to be fighting a losing battle against the natural elements. The season opens with a bit of folklore about a man making a deal with the devil, and that feeling of something menacing and barely understood undergirds everything that happens. None of this is true, or maybe all of it is.

And the show’s writers, including TV veteran John Wirth, never met a bit part they couldn’t turn into a memorable character who instantly lets you know who they are through a single line of dialogue. This may be why the series is so good at attracting guest actors, who drop in for a season of fun. (This season features Andrew Dice Clay and Louis Gossett Jr., among others.) Every time the show feels like it’s run out of stuff to do, it’ll throw to some other character entirely, and you’ll be on a new ride for a scene or two.

Hap and Leonard won’t be for everyone, but trying out its third season — you don’t need to know much about seasons one and two to watch, though they’re available on Netflix — might be a good way to see if it’s for you. The closest comparison I can think of for the series honestly might be the zombie movies of George Romero. No, there are no reanimated corpses in the show, but also, there are. They’re just disguised as normal, well-to-do people, who pretend nothing is wrong.

Hap and Leonard airs Wednesdays on Sundance at 10 pm Eastern. The previous seasons are available on Netflix.