The carney sells it to him for twelve dollars after figuring out that that is all the money Charlie has Charlie is easy to fool and is taken advantage of, time and time again. Charlie has been staring it at for three hours and, as the carnival is about to close, a midget carnival barker responds greedily when Charlie offers to buy the jar. Like many of his neighbors, he is childlike, and later tells his child bride Thedy that he “rode on the merry go round three times the Ferris wheel twice.” It is not the rides that entrance him, however, it is a sideshow attraction: a large glass jar with something floating in it.

Charlie Hill, a heavy set simpleton who works in “the bottoms,” is visiting the carnival on his own. The story begins at a carnival somewhere in Louisiana, near an unnamed city but only ten miles from Wilder’s Hollow, a small settlement on the edge of a swamp where the people live in poverty, ignorance and misery. On its surface, “The Jar” is a simple story, yet it has layers upon layers that make it worth watching more than once. The creative team behind this masterpiece takes Ray Bradbury’s short story and brings it to life on the small screen, expanding it, deepening it and, in the end, making it as fascinating and mysterious as its central object.

“The Jar” is one of the best hours of television I have ever seen.

The jar bradbury