There’s something reassuring about hell needing its own bureaucracy. Not because the prospect of dying and being immediately greeted with contracts, policing, and hierarchies sounds appealing (I’d rather there’d be no afterlife at all), but because the continuity from our own business-minded, rigidly administrative society would, in a depressing way, help orient us among all the morbid dread. It’s a genre observation that’s central to Blumhouse’s new series The Bondsman, where Kevin Bacon hunts demons for the Devil.
When Southern bounty hunter Hub Halloran (Bacon) ambushes his bail-skipping target at a dreary motel (with a hornet’s nest in the ventilation system, no less) he gets his throat slashed for his trouble and bleeds out in the parking lot. He wakes up inside the walls of the motel, a gaping gash across his throat without suffering any serious pain. As his wound miraculously closes up and he returns to his crappy life — a kindly mother Kitty (Beth Grant) and a singer ex-wife Maryanne (Jennifer Nettles), who is now with the shady country club owner Lucky Callahan (Damon Herriman) — he grows suspicious that he’s not supposed to walking God’s green earth.
