There is more than a little of the game of chance in making a TV show. It’s risky. You’re competing for people’s time and attention with a lot of other shows. It’s expensive. Hundreds of people are employed in making it. For this reason, most TV shows follow a well-trodden formula. Cops ’n’ Docs, whodunnits. Period adaptations. Then there are those that dare to break the mould. They take the risk. Sometimes it pays off, sometimes it doesn’t. On occasion, a show will do both.

Carnivale was one such show. Gloriously geeky, and notoriously expensive (a rumoured $4m per episode), it couldn’t find an audience commensurate with the scale of its ambition and was cancelled after just two seasons. The show’s creator, Daniel Knauf, had planned for six, grouped into three ‘books’ of two seasons apiece. It was a tantalising story arc that hinted at a rich and thrilling epic. Still, we have two complete seasons (one and a half more than many shows get), and they are of such high quality that there is much to enjoy. Let any doubters be reassured, although the planned storyline was never to be finished, there is enough to reward even repeated viewing. Carnivale crammed more into its two seasons than many shows fit in eight.

The show was set, for the most part, in the 1930s and boy does it delight in it. A feast for the eyes, every frame is filled with exquisite period detail -the tin plates used at mealtimes, the old time radios, the longjohns-and-dungarees and the dust. Damn if there isn’t a lot of dust. We’re in Steinbeck territory, the great Dust Bowl, among the multitudes struggling westward through the Depression. It is the perfect setting, evoking not just the semi-forgotten world of Tod Browning’s Freaks (though that is a natural touchstone), but tapping into our wider historical understanding of the era. Given what we know of the decade that followed them, it is difficult to regard the 1930s as anything other than a sinister prelude, during which a confluence of historical events – the Depression, the rise of Nazism, the development of destructive technology – churned together to create the conditions for an unprecedented conflict. We look back on the 1930s with a mixture of pity and fear. It was a decade pregnant with dread.

Carnivale’s mood of burgeoning terror is therefore woven into the very fabric of history. The Dust Bowl itself was of such size and destructive power that it resembled a biblical plague. When one character experiences a vision of an atomic explosion it seems at odds with the historical setting. It is. No such explosion would take place for another ten years. When it did, however, it was on the very same location, Alomagordo, New Mexico, with the Trinity atomic test. That word, Trinity. Piling biblical connotations on top of historical allusion and making it work? This is scarily good writing, and all done in the service of the story.