The ambitious, sprawling Under The Banner Of Heaven can’t quite live up to its source material
The cast and writing tackle weighty issues with aplomb, but FX On Hulu’s true-crime show is bogged down by sluggish pacing

Jon Krakauer’s 2003 book Under The Banner Of Heaven is a shocking read, one that begins with the gruesome real-life murders of Brenda Lafferty and her 15-month-old daughter in 1984. The engrossing volume quickly establishes that it’s not so much a “whodunit” but a “whydunit” as it traces centuries of detailed Mormon history in an attempt to answer what might’ve led to their deaths. Adapting this complicated source material is no easy feat, but creator Dustin Lance Black (Milk) translates Krakauer’s work into an emotionally striking TV drama, in part due to his own upbringing in a Mormon household.
The show’s grand scope lies in its quietly sharp prodding of the divisions between fundamentalist Mormons and mainstream Latter-Day Saints, who reject older tenets of the religion, like polygamy and other harsher practices. (The phrase “blood atonement” gets mentioned a few times). UTBOH spans time to examine the origins of these issues, and how many decades later, they crucially impacted the lives of Brenda (Daisy Edgar-Jones) and her in-laws. To put it simply: It’s a ton of information that the book presents quite vividly. But the big difference in how it’s filtered on screen is the addition of fictional Detective Jeb Pyre (Andrew Garfield), a devout Mormon himself.
Jeb’s gradual push-and-pull with his church becomes central to UTBOH as he delves further into Brenda and her toddler Erica’s slayings. It’s a risky move to layer in his internal crisis as a manufactured subplot when the show is already weaving in multiple timelines: the actual investigation itself, a backstory of Brenda’s dynamic with her new family, and the relationship between the various Lafferty brothers over the years. The show also revisits the early 1800s when Joseph Smith (Andrew Burnap) founded Mormonism. Luckily, Jeb and his non-Mormon partner, Bill Taba (a sublime Gil Birmingham), wisely end up as the audience’s lens into UTBOH’s many threads.