A River of No Return

By NANCY DEWOLF SMITH

AMC's new good-spy/bad-spy series, "Rubicon," takes itself so seriously that it is a contender for the most pretentious entry on the already crowded field of conspiracy-theory dramas. (Sunday's two-hour premiere episode begins at 8 p.m. EDT.) Executive producer Henry Bromell demonstrates his ambition best in introductory notes for the press, beginning with a long paragraph in which he explains, for the benefit of people who did not take Latin in school, that there's this river in Italy called the Rubicon...and in ancient Rome, etc., etc., etc.

AMC

James Badge Dale as intelligence agent Will Travers in AMC's 'Rubicon.'

Things perk up a bit when Mr. Bromell cuts to the quick and informs us that " 'Rubicon' was born from the belief that we in the United States could wake up one day soon and find our democracy gone, not vanquished by an army, but by an almost-invisible collusion between business and government." In the show, he promises, we will see "Individuals traveling through the looking glass into a world of abject moral confusion, where nothing is what it seems and no one can be trusted."

Oy. Some of the old movies that allegedly inspired "Rubicon," such as "The Ipcress File" (1965) and "The Conversation" (1974), are indeed classics about snoops who get their heads messed with. But the shadowy conspiracies the guys in these films stumbled across were largely what Hitchcock called MacGuffins: They made no real sense and didn't need to. The directors were more interested in style and atmosphere than in pontificating.

So far, reviewers have been sent just the first four hours of "Rubicon," but it seems determined to eschew high style in favor of a flat, dark world that's appropriately grim yet also numbingly static. As for the plot, it appears that "Rubicon" actually is a riff on the theme that the world is made bad by the latest incarnation of the Trilateral Commission, some cabal of old (white) guys who use war and terrorism to line their pockets.

While some of us would rather watch nail polish dry than hear about all that yet again, clearly there is a market for this sort of thing, which could be described as an "X Files" without the laughs. "Rubicon" certainly has all the basic elements of a thriller of its kind.

It revolves around Will Travers (James Badge Dale) an analyst at the American Policy Institute in New York. API (fictional, but you never know!) is a sequestered federal agency where brainiacs analyze intelligence and advise the government on how to react. Some of the analysts' problems ring true, like the lament that no matter how often they make accurate predictions, their advice is rarely listened to. Maybe it is because they stay informed by reading things like "Friedman's piece on Sudan." LOL.

One case on the table involves a Russian bigwig who may be selling former Soviet missiles to terrorists and who has lately been photographed with two mystery men in "Sofia, Bulgaria" (a big city east of Paris, France).

Will is still reeling from the death of his wife and daughter on 9/11, and gets another blow when his API mentor dies suddenly. As a suspicious Will investigates his friend's death, clues and events will feed a growing realization in him of a conspiracy that takes some lives and threatens others.

Our hero, who is an expert on everything from pattern recognition to the hibernation habits of bears, actually sets off the series' chain of events when he notices that crossword puzzles in different newspapers all have the same clues. In the TV world of espionage, it seems, this is the best way to communicate with agents around the globe. Even Will's dead friend declined to tell him directly or clearly what he knew about goings on around API. Instead, he has left behind coded messages stuffed in odd places, and answers revolving around things like 1912 baseball scores.

There are plenty of quirky characters here, including the proverbial nerd in the basement who always breaks the rules to help Will, and the grizzled retiree who is probably going to get bumped off for helping. Feeding into the main story, Miranda Richardson plays a widow whose powerful husband shot himself after finding a four-leaf clover in his home office.

So far, Mr. Dale—he of the expressive face that was so compelling in HBO's "The Pacific"—seems wasted here. And it's so hard not to be distracted by his hairdo, which looks like the tortured remains of a Davy Crockett hat that's lost its tail in an electrical storm.

It's possible that "Rubicon" and its slogan, "Not every conspiracy is a theory," is nothing more than a piece of commercial entertainment. Or is it the urban intellectual's self-aggrandizing equivalent of alien abduction?

A lot of frustrated people do seek validation in conspiracy theories: Only they and a few others are smart enough to not be duped by sinister forces that have conspired to keep them down in a world that refuses to acknowledge their genius.

Then again, you don't have to be at all smart to notice that the series' opening credits, with their montage of codes and encryptions, look uncannily like the scenes in the movie "A Beautiful Mind" that depict mathematician John Nash's descent into schizophrenic insanity.