Sophist Cat

A new show appeared on Hulu when I checked this morning: Rubicon. This was a godsend, because the summer hiatus is driving me nuts. The pilot is premiering online, with additional episodes to follow on AMC in August. Because I don't have cable, this will be my only date with this show. I feel like we had a nice dinner and shook hands good night.

The episode sets up what's sure to be a season-long arc, a vast conspiracy. Lest we didn't get it, there's the off-putting tagline, "not every conspiracy is a theory." It's not just a pun; the main character, Will Travers, is an inevitably brilliant intelligence analyst. He is (get it?) a theorist, and not just a theorist, but a legend around his decrepit government office. Early in the episode he uncovers something fishy in a large pile of crossword puzzles.

Travers is sad, lonely, and directionless, having lost his wife and daughter in (what else) the World Trade Center. They were there waiting for him that day (also his daughter's birthday) at the top of World Trade. He was late, "he was always late." They died and he didn't. A fellow analyst tells the pretty new girl, "He's never been late for anything since."

Really? That's the useful lesson he chose to draw from the events-of-nine-eleven? In the context of the story, he could have just as easily have learned that birthdays were bad.

Et voila: the story opens on his birthday, and he's forgotten all about it. Good grief.

Now, I'm being far too catty. This is after all, a pilot, and these tics masquerading as traits would probably get worked out over the course of the season. The acting is pretty good, and I like James Badge Dale as Travers. But I have another reason for thinking this show will be a miss rather than a hit: the show's conspiracy motif is just hopelessly dated. The central questions are how, why, and really whether Travers's beloved father-in-law and boss, David Hadas, has been killed. In their last conversation, Hadas asks Travers to meet him at a train station before he leaves town; in the next scene the train crashes in a fiery blaze and kills everyone inside. Maybe Hadas has been murdered or maybe it's just another mass tragedy of the type that seems to follow poor Travers around. There's barely enough of Hadas's charred body to piece together for the closed-casket funeral scene.

It's too bad, since Hadas was played by Peter Gerety, the simpering Judge Daniel Phelan of The Wire, and the jolly alcoholic dad on Mercy. He's great, and I would have liked to see more of him. The relationship between the two men is the best thing the show has going, although it's sometimes over- and awkwardly-explained. (Such as when some minor character tells Travers that Travers had never broken Hadas's heart like that "idiot son of his." Travers replies, "Evan's troubled.") Alas, Hadas is dead. The one episode is all we get.

But wait! Remember the crossword puzzle clues? The proximity of the crossword-puzzle scenes and the death-and-funeral scenes heavily implies that he was either murdered, or that he is, in fact, secretly still alive.

Therein lies my problem. In the nineties, I was completely willing to entertain government conspiracy stories. The Cold War had just ended, and it seemed impossible that all the spies, that entire infrastructure of intelligence-gathering and covert ops just went home to enjoy the spoils of a rising Dow. The government that brought us the hydrogen bomb could surely aspire to be a modern Illuminati. But the nineties are over. In the 2000s, government has brought us a naked, not hidden, desire for control. Their machinations were at times inept, at times objectionable, but always obvious. And they were followed by a government that delivers weekly youtube addresses. Nothing really prevents this kind of government from calling out a hit on its think tank's middle-manager, but the aesthetics of it are all wrong. Spy vs. spy doesn't work quite as well when we can write to each other on Facebook and look up information on Wikipedia. Gossip Girl is well adapted to this new world of camera phones; Rubicon is not.

In the end I'm pretty sure that Hadas will be alive, having somehow been forced to betray the son-in-law he loves so much, but ultimately for his own good. But the secret that's worth keeping, that was so carelessly revealed in the newspaper? I'd be shocked if it shocked me.

Introductions

Isn't everyone doing this these days? Is it like watching Friends (something that everyone else is doing), or is it like watching Battlestar Galactica (something that I should be doing)?

I love television, and I'm interested in narrative. I write historical and narrative non-fiction and I watch just a ridiculous amount of TV. I have many thoughts on narrative and an intense writer's block toward my own work. Oh, "my own work." I write this bittersweetly--I used to be a college professor with no time for my own work, and now I am happily working on a vanity project for a wealthy family and have no energy for my own work. But when I think of what I do, I still imagine that I am a writer, that I am writing a book, that at some point this book will be publishable, maybe even published, that I will be an author. I have three book projects in my head, and they ought to be written or abandoned, but the thought of abandoning them makes me almost as nauseated as the thought of writing them.

But writers write. And if I can't write what I should be writing, I can at least write what I'm always thinking about television and narrative.

"All the Cats of Greece" was printed on a t-shirt a friend brought me back from Japan. It features cartoons of many species of cats, including "siamese cat," "fat cat," "scaredy cat," and "kitty cat." It is fabulous.