![]() So often with a new series, the opening is key and this one is strong. Will her investigation jeopardise John’s unlikely mission? Is any of this even plausible? I’m too caught up in the endlessly imaginative storytelling to care. Detective Agathe Albans (Aliette Opheim) joins the story as the Luxembourg cop investigating the death. It’s part workplace comedy – John struggles to gain favour with irascible oil boss Leslie (Kurtwood Smith) and make nice with his co-workers – and part thriller, following his first trip to Luxembourg to hand over a bag of money, where he inadvertently murders an airport worker. He gets the job done, but his methods are often surprising. John must go undercover at an oil pipeline company in order to travel undetected between Iran and Luxembourg, doing his spy stuff. Writer/director Steve Conrad takes a Homeland-y set-up involving the US’s attempts to curtail Iran’s growing nuclear capability in 2012, and twirls it into a hyperreal fable spun from the PTSD-addled brain of a strange, unknowable man. What I find myself loving about Patriot is its lack of resemblance to anything else I’ve seen, in tone at least. The family business is not dissimilar to Sherlock, but there the similarity ends. Back home in Milwaukee, his nice wife waits for him, his intelligence chief dad (Terry O’Quinn – brilliant) pulls strings at the State Department and his congressman brother, Edward, ( Orange is the New Black’s Michael Chernus) provides offbeat comic relief with his complicated home life and own espionage dabblings. New Zealand newcomer Michael Dorman plays John Tavener (AKA John Lakeman), a thirtysomething Iraq war vet and intelligence operative stationed in Amsterdam, where he has gone native, smoking weed and playing folk songs at open-mic nights. ![]() ![]() And you would rather have the hell beautifully confused out of you for an hour in preference to the heavy-handed plot signposting that goes on in the thick-as-pilchards TV drama so prevalent since Downton Abbey. Why you’ll love it: Because you want a palate cleanser to wash away all the dour procedural TV torment of late. What is it? A US anti-hero spy drama like no other.
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