Outcast is a fiendishly pleasant surprise - a demonic-possession horror drama that leads with its heart instead of its 360-degree neck rotations and suggests a depressing (but timely) theme of social and moral rot in America.
Based on another graphic novel series from Walking Dead creator Robert Kirkman (people keep making comics, and networks keep adapting them), Outcast is set in the gloom of rural West Virginia, where a small-town preacher, Reverend Anderson (Philip Glenister), does what he can to keep his followers' personal demons at bay.
These are not the usual demons of temptation and sin, but icky, spewing cases of possession. The latest is a little boy who ate a cockroach off his bedroom wall and then nibbled one of his index fingers in half, before moving to the devil's favourite trick - levitating off the bed. In its first four episodes, Outcast features many cameos from extras young and old who've all graduated with honours from the Linda Blair School of Acting.
None of this, of course, is played for cheap thrills (or laughs) in the way that the recently launched Preacher favours irony alongside its sense of the supernatural. Outcast is as serious as angioplasty.