This sympathetic hero allows the series to work beautifully as a murder mystery in the classic procedural style. Played with quiet substance by Andrew Garfield, Pyre is a mainstream Mormon who comes to question his own beliefs. But in a brilliant stroke, the series' creator, Dustin Lance Black (the Oscar-winning screenwriter of Milk), has invented the character of Pyre. The crime is real, chronicled in Jon Krakauer's 2003 non-fiction bestseller of the same name.
'Our religion breeds dangerous men,' he tells Detective Jeb Pyre. Early in the captivating series Under the Banner of Heaven, a former Mormon whose wife and baby have just been murdered directs suspicion at a fundamentalist cult, an offshoot of his one-time faith.
