{"id":124855,"date":"2025-11-08T15:36:07","date_gmt":"2025-11-08T15:36:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/124855\/"},"modified":"2025-11-08T15:36:07","modified_gmt":"2025-11-08T15:36:07","slug":"why-you-should-be-watching-patriot","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/124855\/","title":{"rendered":"Why You Should Be Watching ‘Patriot’"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tHow best to explain Patriot? The cult-favorite spy series, which premiered 10 years ago this week on Amazon<\/a> and ran for two seasons, follows CIA operative John Tavner (Michael Dorman, years before his turn as a lovelorn astronaut on For All Mankind) as he goes undercover at a mundane piping manufacturer in Milwaukee. As the pilot lays out, his mission is, in theory, simple: Get hired at the piping company, join the team on a regularly scheduled work trip to Luxembourg, and make a covert cash handoff there with an Iranian agent who will help secure a more U.S.-friendly regime.<\/p>\n

\n\tTonally, though, beneath the coat of tradecraft and international intrigue, the show is about as far from The Americans as you can get. John\u2019s mission goes rapidly awry with a veritable Rube Goldberg machine of oft-absurd speed bumps, including a CIA goof that gives his false Wisconsin identity one too many Social Security Number digits; John\u2019s PTSD dating from a previous job gone bad (and the marijuana dependency he developed while recuperating); and a no-nonsense taskmaster boss (played with malicious aplomb by Kurtwood Smith). Patriot is less interested in dead drops than it is in charting John\u2019s plodding march into morally gray situations and mounting depression. It\u2019s also very, very funny: One way that John copes is by turning up at open mic nights to perform gloomy folk songs with little concern for OPSEC. In what is likely the former Iranian president\u2019s only appearance in a singer-songwriter ballad, one lyric has John crooning about the day the United States learned that \u201cMahmoud Ahmadinejad was fucking around with new centrifuges<\/a>.\u201d Later in the song, he sings, \u201cI\u2019m showing several signs of increasing mental instability.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tCreated by Steven Conrad, best known for writing dreary yet whimsical films like The Pursuit of Happyness and The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, Patriot never managed to capture an audience during its all-too-short run. But through the power of rewatches it has won a passionate fandom in the years since. Hilarious, bleak, and bizarre, it represents the spirit of Peak TV: the distillation of an auteur\u2019s singular vision in a brief moment of if-you-build-it-they-will-come studio optimism.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\t\tEditor\u2019s picks<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cI pitched it to Amazon, and at the time they had an appetite for a show like that,\u201d says Conrad, who admits the concept was a bit of a bait-and-switch from the start. \u201cI think they were banking that the spy genre was going to do a little more legwork than the show that we all privately had in mind.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tIn the decade since its debut, that sneakily idiosyncratic show with oddball plots and winning performances by beloved characters has slowly but surely made its mark. It sports a bustling subreddit<\/a> and ongoing word-of-mouth recruits to the fandom. And lately, Prime\u2019s recommendations algorithm seems to have taken a shine to it \u2014 perhaps mistaking it for a sharp spy game as its human predecessors did, or perhaps not. (Prime declined to comment.) For viewers and those who had a hand in making the show, the only regret is that there isn\u2019t more Patriot to devour.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cIt was all just a real delight,\u201d says Smith, whose cantankerous piping executive had, what else, a dark past. Of Patriot\u2019s 2019 cancellation, he says, \u201cI have not forgiven Amazon for this.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tPATRIOT ARRIVED COURTESY of Prime\u2019s short-lived Pilot Season program, then the cornerstone of the streamer\u2019s eager investment in original programming. Pilot Season, which launched in 2013, was an attempt to add a viewer-forward sheen to Hollywood\u2019s traditional buffet of inaugural episodes. Instead of studio execs making the call on whether to send a given program to series, it was up to viewers<\/a>, who were offered a full slate of freshman episodes from new shows and asked to share their feedback on what they hoped to see more of. Though the program launched some notable hits \u2014 among them The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, Transparent, and The Man in the High Castle \u2014 it would last just five years.<\/p>\n

\t\tRelated Content<\/p>\n

\n\tBut in the lead-up to 2015, the studio was still taking big swings. \u201cTen years ago, the nature of this business was a little different,\u201d Conrad says. \u201cYou could feel that the feature [film] landscape had changed and become primarily IP and superhero movies. TV had a depth then, and an ambition, on the heels of very successful long-term shows like Sopranos and Mad Men. You could just feel that becoming kind of a new art form.\u201d<\/p>\n

Espionage thrillers were good business, then and now, but some of Patriot\u2019s layered complexity is a reflection of the TV of the time. When I asked Terry O\u2019Quinn, who played Tom Tavner \u2014 John\u2019s father and the senior CIA officer who keeps sending his increasingly battered son into the field \u2014 about its initial billing as a spy drama, he told me he\u2019d never thought of the show that way. \u201cIt\u2019s kind of a family drama,\u201d he says. Indeed, both Tom and John\u2019s brother (Michael Chernus) are called in to assist with problems ranging from the meddling of an overqualified Luxembourgish detective to an ill-timed run-in with a puppeteer.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"\"<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\tSmith\u2019s cantankerous piping executive glares at Dorman\u2019s depressed spy.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tElizabeth Morris\/Prime video<\/p>\n

\n\tPatriot resists easy characterization chiefly because of Conrad\u2019s writing, which gives his characters strange rhythms and, sometimes, even stranger verbiage. (Conrad, who regularly performs in a band around the L.A. area, also wrote the show\u2019s soundtrack, including John\u2019s brooding folk songs.) \u201cEvery week or week and a half when we would get a new script, it was like Christmastime,\u201d Smith says. He remembers getting the script for one early episode from Conrad, who cautioned that Smith\u2019s character, Leslie Claret, would be delivering a speech that Conrad wanted to film as a \u201coner\u201d \u2014 a single, long shot, with his character on camera nearly the entire time. No problem, thought Smith. Then he read the script.<\/p>\n

\n\tAs part of a pep talk ahead of an important pitch in Luxembourg, Leslie \u2014 who in the Patriot universe wrote a seminal piping textbook called The Integral Principles of the Structural Dynamics of Flow \u2014 gathers his team around him. \u201cKeep it simple,\u201d he starts, before diving into a monologue that includes the promise that \u201cusing a field of half-seized sprats and brass-fitted nickel slits, our bracketed caps and splay-flexed brace columns vent dampers to dampening hatch depths of one-half meter from the damper crown to the spurv plinth.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cI said, \u2018Steve, does this mean anything? Where did you get all this?\u2019\u201d Smith says. \u201cAnd he said, \u2018No, it doesn\u2019t mean anything. They\u2019re all words and expressions that I found in various places having to do with piping. But no, put together it means nothing.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tTo memorize it, Smith invented meanings for all those nickel slits and spurv plinths to give the speech at least some false cohesion. He then spent a month devoting an hour or two every morning to rehearsing it, with another session later in the day with an assistant. In the end, the scene was filmed in just two attempts \u2014 with the second necessary only because of a camera error. When the episode premiered at the Berlin Film Festival, the speech got a standing ovation.<\/p>\n

\n\tStill, the overall response to the show was muted. Despite getting picked up for a full season after a favorable response during Pilot Season, reviews were scarce and middling. \u201cAmazon\u2019s Patriot is a good example of how \u2018peak TV\u2019 inspires over-confidence in old ideas,\u201d The Verge declared<\/a>, before lamenting that \u201cprestige television has gotten sort of out of control.\u201d Comparisons to the work of the Coen brothers were rampant and not always positive.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe show chugged along nonetheless, gradually attracting fans who adored its stark cinematography and weirdo colloquialisms. (If you watch it, you are unlikely ever to think about the word \u201ccool\u201d the same way again.) \u201cI\u2019ve had people come up [to me] and they seem to either really love it or they didn\u2019t know anything at all about it,\u201d says O\u2019Quinn. The actor is most often recognized for his role as John Locke on Lost, but the fans who know him as Tom Tavner are especially fervent. \u201cThe people who were turned on to it seemed to be crazy about it.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tPATRIOT WAS RENEWED for a second season, which debuted in 2018. Filming took the cast and crew to Paris for a whopping five months. One day of shooting left Smith and O\u2019Quinn, who had become fast friends, riding the Metro for hours on end. O\u2019Quinn remembers confiding to Smith that if it were up to him, he\u2019d just keep on doing Patriot and then retire. \u201cWe\u2019re both of a certain age,\u201d O\u2019Quinn recalls saying at the time. \u201cIf I could just do this for five or six more years and call it a day, I\u2019d be pretty happy.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tBut Patriot was not to have a long life. Conrad says that he knew the show\u2019s days were numbered midway through the Paris shoot, and that John\u2019s story should be wrapped up as cleanly as possible: \u201cI could read the writing on the wall. I had every sense that we weren\u2019t going to have a Season Three.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tBy the time the show was officially canceled in 2019, Peak TV was already contracting and Prime in particular was going through a period of executive tumult. \u201cThere were three different presidents of the studio while we were making that show,\u201d Conrad says. \u201cEven in this business, that\u2019s a lot of turnover.\u201d (O\u2019Quinn likens the rotating executives and resulting fallout to \u201ca pride of lions \u2014 when a new lion comes in, they kill all the babies.\u201d)<\/p>\n

\n\tThe changes at Prime meant that Patriot had no champion at the studio level; it got to feeling, Conrad says, like \u201cthe show doesn\u2019t belong to anybody.\u201d But he believes that the series benefitted from that dynamic in some ways, too, skating through production receiving fewer studio notes than you might expect for a show that often pairs wanton violence with deadpan slapstick. \u201cIt was a little more \u2018ours\u2019 than is ordinary because of all that,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

\n\tThough it hasn\u2019t been so long since its cancellation, it\u2019s hard to imagine a show with such an eccentric approach getting the green light today, never mind that kind of creative freedom in production. \u201cWhen we first started, it was, \u2018This is the way television should be,\u2019\u201d says Smith. \u201cWe\u2019re not worrying about ratings and this and that. We\u2019re doing something that\u2019s good, and hoping that, eventually, people will watch a lot of it. But the idea creatively is to build a good product. And then that changed, just in the time that we were doing this show.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cThat\u2019s the sad commentary on American television, or maybe television in general, because it has to hit the middle of the target,\u201d O\u2019Quinn says. \u201cIt can\u2019t be on the perimeter. And Steven writes \u2014 he lives on the perimeter.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Patriot creative trust, for its part, is still going strong. Conrad has penned a real-life version of the Structural Dynamics of Flow and written episodes of a surreal podcast<\/a> voiced by Smith\u2019s character, which Smith says he recorded in a closet at home filled with hats for sound dampening. Conrad is a creator who tends to draw from a recurring stable of actors in all his works, and many Patriot cast members have popped up in his more recent projects, like 2019\u2019s spiritually similar thriller series Perpetual Grace, LTD and 2021\u2019s stop-motion animated series Ultra City Smiths. The upcoming HBO limited series, DTF St. Louis, which Conrad created and directed, will feature his brother, Chris, a memorable piping colleague from Patriot.<\/p>\n

\n\tI spoke with Conrad, O\u2019Quinn, and Smith at a difficult time for the Patriot team: Last month, Chicago artist Tony Fitzpatrick, who played a delightfully dreadful security guard named Jack Birdbath in Patriot, died. As the news broke, Patriot alumni found themselves calling and texting one another from around the world, sharing memories of Fitzpatrick and their time working with him. \u201cWe lost Jack,\u201d Conrad says. \u201cBut somehow, knowing that 10 years later, everybody still cares about each other that way, enough so that we all stopped what we were doing and we all found each other \u2014 we\u2019re all going to find each other again someday on something else.\u201d<\/p>\n

\t\tTrending Stories<\/p>\n

\n\tOn his birthday last year, Smith sat back and wondered what he should do to celebrate. Then he landed on an idea: He would rewatch Patriot with his wife. He\u2019d seen it before, of course, back when it was newly out, but that was different. \u201cYou know exactly what\u2019s coming, and you\u2019re hoping that this scene works, or that works,\u201d he says. \u201cYou\u2019ve got all those things going on in your head, and you\u2019re not just sitting there watching.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tThis time, though? He laughed and laughed. \u201cWe watched several episodes, and I was so knocked out by the way things were put together,\u201d he says. \u201cI just thought it was great.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"How best to explain Patriot? The cult-favorite spy series, which premiered 10 years ago this week on Amazon…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":124856,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[29],"tags":[414,156,111,139,69,437],"class_list":{"0":"post-124855","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-tv","8":"tag-amazon","9":"tag-entertainment","10":"tag-new-zealand","11":"tag-newzealand","12":"tag-nz","13":"tag-tv"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/124855","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=124855"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/124855\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/124856"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=124855"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=124855"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=124855"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}