What were your plans for what would have come in the four unmade seasons?

DK: Like I said, I’m not going to claim I knew the minute detail. Season three is five years later. We find Jonesy—he survived his gunshot wound and is pitching for a professional baseball team. His wife [Libby] is a typical baseball wife back in ’39. The carnival is completely split up; everybody’s gone their separate ways. The only vestige of the carnival as it was is Ben and Samson, and they’re working at another carnival, still on Management’s trail.

Then on the Brother Justin side, we find he’s become this incredibly politically influential radio preacher. And there’s Iris and Sofie, and they’re both in this fight. He’s a shell, almost, and these two women are in a power struggle over who’s controlling Brother Justin. Sofie is Brother Justin’s wife. Of course, she’s his daughter, but he doesn’t know that. She knows that. She could bring him down pretty easily, but she’s afraid of herself now, too.
Then we introduce, in the very first episode, you see this 4-year-old kid come running up and hugging Brother Justin, saying “Daddy.” Is this Brother Justin’s child, or is this Ben’s child, because they both had relations with Sofie? That would kind of tee us off to the second one. That would take us through the war. And then the first half of that would be, “Avengers assemble,” winds of war calling them together, gotta get this group back together again. Ben’s like, “This isn’t just about me. This is about us.” And pulling everybody out of their lives and answering this call, and moving into going to Europe to try to acquire these documents or… I knew they were going to be talismans. What they’re going to need when they’re engaged in this war. Then there’d be a confrontation of some sort at the end of season four.

Then taking us to the end, it’s all about the [atomic] bomb. It’s all about the Manhattan Project and worrying about it, finding out what it is.

This show was insanely cool and had the potential to be one of HBO's best ever shows. Seriously, I'd take these two seasons over just about anything the premium channel has put out. There's a level of creativity and thoughtfulness that is near unheard of in TV. Unfortunately, these seasons amount to god-tier set-up for shit-hits-the-fan moments that we never got to see. As soon as we were going to get some big pay-offs, Carnivàle was cancelled. Nobody watched it: it was too slow, too smart, too weird for its time. This is one of the biggest creative what-ifs ever in my opinion. I still love these seasons, but rewatching them know that the story doesn't get its proper end isn't too appealing. Still can't rate it lower though: what we got was way too good.