Rubicon (2010)

It's unsurprising that Rubicon didn't make it past one season, and there were moments during the first couple of episodes when I wondered whether to stick with it. Moving glacially slowly through a conspiracy that eventually turned out to involve leaders of the intelligence community manipulating catastrophic world events for financial gain, the show at first eked out the tiniest bits of the overarching plot. And then towards the end of the 13 episode run it felt like someone knew that cancellation was coming and the revelations came thick and fast and the show became much more exciting. 

James Badge Dale played lead Will Travers, an analyst with API (American Policy Institute) who fit in somewhere among the NSA, CIA and FBI, who was our window into this world and the conspiracy he slowly, ever so slowly, began to uncover. His team included an alcoholic, a nervy beardy bloke and a guy who was being harassed by his wife, while Will's creepy boss Kale Ingram (Arliss Howard) played the requisite 'is he bad or is he good' part that Skinner held for early seasons of The X-Files. Miranda Richardson was Katherine Rhumor, Will's sort of civilian counterpart, in that she was uncovering secrets following her husband's suicide that eventually segued into Will's investigations. 

By far the most compelling character was the API boss and leader of the conspirators Truxton Spangler (what an ace name!) who was played by Michael Cristofer, initially as a sort of neurotic nut, but then the character's evil intentions were revealed and he became even more interesting. Occasionally hard to follow, the many snippets of information and the ongoing terrorism plot held my interest alongside the personal lives of the main players. Maybe the story would have worked better as a mini series or a feature film, with a trimming of extraneous red herrings. Miranda Richardson could have done with a bit more to do as well. Rubicon started around the same time as The Shadow Line and had a similar slow paced, oft-confusing plot, but the British series pulled it off with much more style and substance in only 7 episodes.