A judge seeks vigilante justice in Amazon's 'Hand of God'

In what figures to be a strong fall season for original streaming series, Amazon checks in with what appears to be one of the strongest in “Hand of God.”

Dropping with 10 episodes Friday, Sept. 4, the hourlong drama stars Ron Perlman (“Sons of Anarchy,” “Beauty and the Beast”) as morally corrupt judge Pernell Harris who, after a suicide attempt has left his son in a coma, has a breakdown and begins hearing and seeing what he thinks are messages from God. And the messages are telling him to go track down the man who raped his daughter-in-law (Alona Tal, “Burn Notice”) and thus caused his son to put a bullet in his own head.

As the jurist embarks on his campaign of vigilante justice, his social-climber wife, Crystal (Dana Delany, “Body of Proof,” “Desperate Housewives”), thinks her husband has lost his mind. She is ready to move on from the tragedy but the judge's antics — such as in the pilot's opening scene where he's standing naked in a public fountain and chanting in tongues — won't allow her to.

And the audience is left to wonder whether his visions are real or just the product of a traumatized psyche.

“I like that Ben (Watkins, creator/executive producer) rides a fine line with that,” Delany says. “I don't think we will ever know for sure. I'm not sure. You know, it's like in life, when you see a sign and you think, ‘Oh my God!' And then later you think, ‘Well actually, no, that was just a leaf falling.' But who knows?”

“I think she thinks he's sick. There's no way she buys into it. No.”

Crystal is not a woman to be underestimated. According to Delany, her character is someone from rough-and-tumble beginnings, who married her way out of poverty and was living a comfortable life until tragedy was visited on her family. Now, she's pulling her husband out of the mental ward and doing damage control. But while she's concerned with Pernell's well-being, she also has her own agenda, which will become clear as the season progresses.

“I feel like that's one thing that Ben did really well,” Delany says, “is every character has their own agenda. You just don't quite know what it is yet. And I'd say that mine has more to do ... with my own advancement.”