On the hunt for some truly unmissable telly but don’t know what to watch next? Let our essential selection nudge you in the right direction… This week, CARNIVALE.

As American TV hits the history books for its most popular programming, we take a look back to a recent and very decent Great Depression era drama, which shows the other side of what was going on during the time when Knucky Thomson was living it up in fellow HBO production Boardwalk Empire.

Set in the arid environs of the Mid-West American Dust Bowl in the impoverished mid-thirties, the show follows Ben Hawkins (Sin City’s Nick Stahl), a young country boy and jobbing labourer, who discovers a unique and disconcerting power to heal, which leaves him feeling forced to join a travelling circus. Here he meets a band of brothers in the various shapes of its freak-show employees, and their journey is cut against a deeply unforgiving religious undertone running throughout the destitute communities they pass between.

While the dark mood of the time is a stark juxtaposition against Boardwalk’s bright lights and free-flowing liquor, this is the austerity which real people felt at this time, and is something we've had a taste of in the flashback scenes to the youth of Don Draper (or rather Dick Whitman) in passages of Mad Men.  

With various star turns from well-knowns such as Clancy Brown as the fanatical Methodist preacher man Brother Justin Crowe and Clea DuVall as the tarot reader Sophie, it was the graphics and perfectly rendered freakeries which stole the show’s two seasons and make this the perfect TV Gold watch...

To find out more about Carnivale, click here.