Review – Rubicon

Rubicon – AMC – 8:00/7:00pm Sunday – USA

Imagine you’re a cable television network. Imagine you’ve launched your first scripted series and it’s an instant critical smash hit. How can you possibly follow that up? How could AMC ever be expected to follow up the award winning Mad Men? Well, with Breaking Bad, of course. So how can you possibly follow up two enormous critical hits? How can AMC possibly follow up Breaking Bad? Needless to say, Rubicon, AMC’s third original drama series, has some enormous shoes to step into.

One thing to note about Mad Men and Breaking Bad is that they’re not even trying to be the same show. Rather than take the formula of ‘quiet period drama’ of Mad Men and replicate it hoping for more success they decided to launch ‘crazy drug-fuelled descent into hell’ as the follow up, and as far apart as those two worlds are, Rubicon is in another world entirely. Rubicon stars James Badge Dale (Robert Leckie from The Pacific) as Will, an analyst at a federal intelligence agency whose job it is to look for patterns, and who in the pilot discovers what he believes to be a pattern hidden amongst the crossword puzzles of a series of major newspapers.

He takes this information to his superstitious boss, who also happens to be his father-in-law, David (Hey! It’s Judge Phelan from The Wire!). What follows is the start of what I’m sure will be many twists and turns that will continue throughout the first season of Rubicon’s run. Much like Mad Men and Breaking Bad before it, Rubicon does a great job of deliberately keeping you at a distance. It’s almost impossible to tell where this series is headed, and there’s no way for me to truly judge its power until I’ve seen more of it. Rubicon is going to be one of those cases where a whole season will have to play out before a final verdict can be reached. Needless to say though, there’s enough here to warrant a full seasons viewing.

James Badge Dale made for an interesting lead in The Pacific, and does a similar job here with the haunted Will. He does a great job at slowly letting us into the world of Will, and the show manages to just hint at the sadness underneath his mellow exterior. Aside from one stand out moment which felt far too on the nose, Rubicon is subtle and carefully crafted. That one moment comes when it’s revealed that Will’s wife and child were killed in 9/11 and it’s an unfortunate glaring moment that doesn’t come naturally to the characters speaking the dialogue and is the rare moment of obvious exposition in an otherwise intelligent and intriguing episode.

A mystery that feels like it’s ticking away in the background, and the overshadowing feeling that we don’t really know what’s going on and nor do the players, is what makes Rubicon really work in its pilot. The first episode is a compelling, intelligent and moody hour of television that grips you from the start, it doesn’t grab you by the throat, but instead entices you into its world. The New York of Rubicon is a grey, cold place covered in snow. It’s a world that is sure to leave some viewers feeling uninvited, but it’s a world that fascinated me.

I suspect that what we’re seeing is already part of an ongoing pattern and as the series progresses more will be revealed. There’s more than enough here to warrant a season commitment to the show, but most importantly AMC have generated more than enough points with Mad Men and Breaking Bad for us to give them the benefit of the doubt even if we’re a touch unsure. Not that there’s much to be unsure about Rubicon’s pilot, it makes for a persuasive invitation into a dark and mysterious world; one I look forward to delving further into.

Good, Alright, Bad Or Ugly?
Good