'Pine Barrens': An Anti-Buddy Comedy That's Also a Living Nightmare
Show spoilers
Two mobsters chase a seemingly invincible man through the South Jersey forest, and he vanishes, leaving only a trail of blood. As day turns into night and cold into much colder, they abandon the search for survival mode, bonding, bickering and threatening each other until they are finally rescued in the light of the next morning.
David Chase, the show's creator, reaches for a different register entirely: in the woods, in the snow, he says, it has a fairy tale quality.
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Chase's fairy tale framing comes with a catch, since unlike a fairy tale this one carries no moral — and that missing moral is exactly why the hour lodges in your head.
The no-moral reading is tidy but a bit grand. The actual engine is two men in the woods who spend the whole night threatening each other and then walk out together at first light, which is a joke about how little the crisis changed either of them.