Patriot: Season 1

This show - something from Amazon Prime I'd never heard of and never seen any advertisements for until someone on Twitter mentioned it offhand - is legitimately one of my favorite shows of 2017.

Let's start with the concept. Shitty title aside, the show's about a CIA-esque intelligence officer going under non-official cover to deliver a large quantity of money to an Iranian political candidate in Luxembourg. It's ostensibly a political thriller, but what it actually is is just the blackest, darkest, driest comedy I've seen. This is tonally the Coen brothers and visually Wes Anderson. How could I not love it?

Michael Dorman stars as John Tavner, alias John Lakeman, the absolutely broken and miserable man pictured in the poster above. He has taken to dealing with his PTSD and existential depression by retelling his experiences in droning, monotone folk songs. It's perfectly absurd, and holy shit does it just plain work. His actual boss, the one tasking him with acts of international espionage, is his father, played by Terry O'Quinn, who trusts him explicitly to handle anything and everything thrown at him, up to and including the murder of otherwise innocent people. But, again, tonally, it works. There's a weird, slightly satirical distance between this man who literally orders his son to murder people in Europe and the idea that, shit, they're just a father-son pair who are very close and love each other very much. Rounding out the family is John's older brother, the "fuck up," who is merely a Texas congressman rather than an international spy. He sleeps until one and wears absurd track suits everywhere - and he's maybe the only character in the whole show who is unabashedly happy.

To go undercover, John needs to get a job at a very specific company that does business in both Luxembourg and Iran, which is how he finds himself in way over his head posing as an industrial engineer at a piping firm based in Milwaukee. His boss there? Kurtwood Smith, who is somehow even more of a Red Forman character here than he was as Red Forman, just an extremely old school hardass who instantly dislikes John "Lakeman" and senses that he's distracted and lazy, as if piping isn't the single most important thing in the world to him.

Some might complain that the show has a convoluted plot. It does - but that's very much intentional, and part of its Coen-y, Anderson-like charm. What should be a simple bang-bang money exchange in Luxembourg goes, obviously, horribly awry, and suddenly John finds himself travelling back and forth between Milwaukee and Luxembourg trying to maintain his cover as a piping expert while committing all sorts of nefarious crimes in the name of re-securing a bag full of cold hard cash. By the third episode or so (out of ten) we've got, among other things:

• An airport employee stealing the bag, and then John murdering of a few of the airport employee's family members in the act of retrieving the bag, igniting a rivalry with a family of large Brazilian men
• The Iranian contact in Luxembourg double-crossing our protagonists, and instead preparing to funnel these funds directly toward an Iranian nuclear weapons program instead of against it; he too ends up murdered by John.
• The lone Luxembourg City homicide detective investigating these murders trying to piece everything together, interviewing "Lakeman" and his piping company coworkers in both Luxembourg and Milwaukee.
• Kurtwood Smith's Red Forman character looking for any and every reason to fire "Lakeman," and John's constant struggle to remain in his good graces.
• Some poor schlub at the piping company being pulled into the undercover operation when "Lakeman" needs his pee to pass a drug test.
• A security guard at the piping company overhearing this entire conversation, and knowing who and what "Lakeman" is, and holding this blackmail opportunity over him.
• The only other candidate for John's piping engineering job, suffering from brain damage after John pushed him in front of a truck to get the job, beginning to slowly regain his memory of, you know, John pushing him in front of a truck.
• The mysterious wife of an Iranian nuclear engineer on her way to Luxembourg in order to obtain the bag full of money.
• Throughout it all, John desperately misses his wife. Wouldn't you?

It's a lot to take in, and again, that's the point. Facing any one of these issues would be a crippling obstacle for any of us, and here's poor miserable John trying to balance and stave off all of this, to the point where something like "get your paperwork in tomorrow or you'll be fired" is, like, the eighth-most pressing thing on his to-do list.

This isn't a show for everyone. I get that. It's very unapologetically going for a very specific tone and style, and if that tone and style aren't for you, hey, sorry. But such is the age of Peak TV, right? If the '00s were all about the emergence of a few certain shows being critically and commercially successful "prestige dramas" that rivaled middlebrow movies, then the onslaught of streaming options we face today is all about there being something for every single niche and specific taste, there being an outlet for almost every voice with something to say, you name it. That I never once saw an advertisement for Patriot, even within Amazon Prime's streaming app itself, is very telling, and really too bad. But if word of mouth is still worth anything at all, then please - any and all of you reading this, give this thing a shot! The entire pilot is available on YouTube; watch the first eight minutes or so to get the crash course on the vibe and style they're going for. If you like that, stick around. That's all!