“Escooz me, is dat some vokka an’ oranjuice I see in your hand right dere? Do you date me?”

AMC has an interesting track record with original series. Their first attempt at one was a show called Remember WENN in 1996, about a radio station before WWII, but after AMC found new management the show was canceled. They went about a decade with no original programming, until 2007 when Mad Men premiered and the year after when they introduced Breaking Bad, potentially the two best shows on television currently. So it’s not often that they take that leap, but when they do, you know it’s high quality. The pilot for their newest series, Rubicon, played on the heels of the Breaking Bad season 3 finale recently.

Rubicon follows Will Travers, “an intelligence analyst who cracks codes for a living.” Travers is played by James Badge Dale, who you may know as Robert Leckie from The Pacific, or from 24 as Chase Edmunds, or from CSI as Henry Darius, etc. I haven’t seen him in any of those roles, but I have to say that he was exceedingly boring as Will Travers. I suppose this could be explained by the fact that in the show his wife and daughter died in the WTC on 9/11 (what conspiracy show wouldn’t touch base with that?), but I’m pretty sure it’s set in present day, and that was at least long enough ago to regain some semblance of a personality. I’ve never seen a lead actor be so boring in the first episode of a show. And that goes for Will Travers’ coworkers too, who are all equally sticks-in-the-mud. You’d think a show about conspiracy theories would require some quirky and interesting characters, but these people investigating all these conspiracies are literally the most boring people I’ve ever watched. Think about The Lone Gunmen from The X-Files, and then their own spin-off show, The Lone Gunmen. Those three characters could not have been more eccentric and perfect to be investigating the stories most people would balk at. I guess they wanted to make it more “serious.” At least they could try not to patronize us by trying to make us think Will Travers is smart because he talks fast and uses jargon. There’s no subtlety to it either; at one point, Will arrives at his desk at work and randomly grabs a book that quite noticeably says “String Theory” and stuffs it into his book shelf for no reason.

The show opens with a platform for the story to come: Rich old guy wakes up, finds a four leaf clover in his newspaper, and shoots his brains out. Bringing out the clichés good and early, I see. Meanwhile, Will Travers is busy rifling through newspaper crossword puzzles, figuring out that the government is a four leaf clover, but who is the fourth leaf? As soon as he lets his boss in on this, he acts suspiciously and tells Will that it’s nothing, and proceeds to show all this to his boss. Obviously whatever he found out is a big deal, as he is questionably killed in a train crash the next morning with his car parked in space 13, which as a superstitious man he never would’ve parked in. Man, we’ve got conspiracies inside of conspiracies inside of other conspiracies here.

So now it’s up to Will to take the torch from his dead boss and move into that position, which he obviously does or there’d be no rest of the show. I honestly have to say I was entirely underwhelmed by the pilot of Rubicon. When the entire show is about a conspiracy that deals with a Bilderberg Group of sorts where rich white males control the world and you already show them in the first episode, as well as their man in Will’s company, it would seem that they’re revealing their cards a bit early. Like I said earlier, there is little subtlety here, and the whole subject just is not handled anywhere near as masterfully as Mad Men’s advertising environment or The X-Files’ realistically bureaucratic FBI backdrop, or even as well as Fringe’s rip-off attempt at being The X-Files. Not to mention every single character is SO boring. I can’t see myself following this show unless the next episode or two completely knock my socks off, because this pilot episode didn’t do much for me.