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Kevin Bacon can't save The Bondsman from TV hell

Prime Video's action-horror series is DOA.

By Brian Tallerico  |  April 1, 2025 | 9:00am
Photo: Prime
TV Reviews The Bondsman
Kevin Bacon can't save The Bondsman from TV hell
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Kevin Bacon scowls his way through Prime Video’s The Bondsman as if he doesn’t really want to be there—and neither will you. Echoes of vastly superior shows resonate through all eight episodes of this series about demons, bail bondsmen, and country-music singers, a program that would have an identity crisis if it had enough personality of its own to qualify. Hideously shot through with CGI that would have looked dated two decades ago, filmed with almost no sense of atmosphere whatsoever, and ground down by dialogue that rarely sounds like it’s being said by an actual human being, The Bondsman serves no purpose other than to add a few new deep cuts to the next round of “Six Degrees Of Kevin Bacon.”

TV viewers of a certain age may vaguely remember a show from Fox’s 1998 season, a time when producers were trying desperately to find the next The X-Files. That’s when the network premiered Brimstone, starring Thirtysomething’s Peter Horton as a NYC cop who went to Hell after killing the man who raped his wife. Years later, Horton is told by the Devil himself that he will be sent back to this earthly plane to capture more than 100 souls who escaped eternal damnation. It was a bomb, canceled before it even finished its first season.

Enter the remarkably similar The Bondsman, the story of a man named Hub (Bacon), a bounty hunter who is murdered in the show’s opening scene, his throat cut from ear to ear. The killing was plotted by a local tough guy named Lucky (Damon Herriman, who was so great in Justified but feels wasted here), who happens to now be sleeping with Hub’s ex Maryanne (Jennifer Nettles) and hoping to be the stepfather of his son Cade (Maxwell Jenkins). 

It turns out that Hub’s demise is only temporary. His corporeal form springs back to life, complete with a hole in his throat that he’s forced to tape up so the cigarette smoke reaches his lungs. Before long, Hub’s wounds have healed, and he basically just considers himself a walking miracle, set on revenge against those who tried to take him out. It’s not until Midge (a miscast Jolene Purdy) finds him that he learns the truth: He’s now basically a bondsman for Satan. Demons have been escaping Hell, killing poor humans before taking over their bodies, and Hub has to send them back to Satan’s clutches. How he does so is one of the show’s many gray areas. Sometimes it seems to just take a shotgun.  

The Bondsman becomes a balancing act between demon-of-the-week escapees that Hub has to track down and an increasingly fraught family drama regarding the guy who had him whacked. The scenes between Hub, his mother Kitty (Beth Grant), Cade, and Lucky thud with unrealistic dialogue and flat performances. Herriman tries his best to give these aspects of the show some life, but everyone else seems downright bored by the relationship dynamics. It doesn’t help that Bacon and Nettles have zero chemistry, but The Bondsman overall suffers from a stunning lack of heat, dirt, and grit. This is a show that loves to remind viewers it’s on a streaming service with its gore quotient and liberal use of profanity but has no sexual tension or actual stakes. And the visual effects are downright depressing, leading one to wonder why 2020 shows often look so much cheaper than network ones from the ’90s like The X-Files that had to work around their TV budgets to produce something effective.

Part of the problem is that even the demons lack personality. The pattern becomes a simple one wherein a demon murders and then takes over someone shockingly close to Hub’s home base, but the half-hour episodes give each of these poor unfortunate souls almost nothing to do but glower into the camera as their eyes glow a cheap reddish color. A demon who basically throws a car on two bodies is at least vaguely memorable for his weapon of choice, and the ultimate big bad of the season in the final installments has some striking moments, but the series does depressingly little with a concept that seems so expansive in terms of supernatural potential.

There’s that word again: Supernatural, the record-setting CW hit, feels like an obvious template here with its willingness to blend fact and legend into something entertainingly fresh. Bacon is clearly going for the kind of side-eyed wit that made Jensen Ackles and Jared Padalecki into Comic-Con icons, but the Winchester boys have nothing to fear in terms of challengers to the throne. Any eight-episode run of their show during its entire 15 seasons is better at precisely what this show sets out to do: blend relatable human interactions with impossible supernatural ones and use one to influence the other. 

Maybe a quarter-century from now, someone will resurrect this idea and try the Brimstone and Bondsman template again—and do it right for once. As someone once said, the greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist. It would be best to treat The Bondsman the same way.  

The Bondsman premieres April 3 on Prime Video   

 
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