Scott Ellington's Blog

Rubicon

I’m confident this series isn’t worth the investment of time and attention it demands.

Having adjusted my audio volume level for

(the tons of rapid, mumbled fragments of frontloaded) exposition, I was totally unprepared for the unexpected

moment that comes 25½ minutes into the pilot episode:

Ed Bancroft calls “dead” David Haddas’ office phone to continue their longstanding chess competition and

Will Travers,

who is standing in David’s office

(in order to be) startled by a LOUD incoming call to a dead man.  Will is understandably slow to answer David’s phone,

(which) lets its deafening ring assault my ears three times before he picks up the Mitel/Inter-Tel Endpoint Executive deskphone handset.  That’s when I realized this showrunner has absolutely no problem annoyng the hell out of his audience — who will probably be kept confused and disoriented for as long as we persist in watching a successful series that absolutely depends upon misdirected self-contempt for the audience. 

Apparently, I don’t spell success like a television executive…so I’m prone to disappointment.

Other notable objections:

• Rubicon’s pilot episode begins on Will’s birthday. April 8, and David Haddas dies the next morning, but it’s snowing lightly at David’s funeral in New York in the middle of April — which seems unlikely.
• A phenomenal number of first names are flung at the viewer who is obligated to remember who’s who in order to make adequate sense of a story in which individuated, personal threads of narrative won’t come together (maybe ever) in the pattern of the first thirteen episodes unless the viewer studies the story repeatedly.  And repeated viewings greatly assist the viewer in grasping the foreshadowing and ironic implications latent in the significance of who’s talking about what, where to look in the frame for previously overlooked information that may help the viewer to piece together a puzzle-solution that can’t possibly justify the effort expended from my moment of choosing to watch the pilot through several seasons WAY down the road to a mythic, pie-in-the-sky narrative-payday for my attention’s ROI; and leading to the viewer conclusion that If I don’t get it, it’s my fault.  While I can’t pick up the obnoxiously loudly ringing telephone,  I can choose to hang up on this television show while turning to the Bourne (Maslowian) pyramid or Three Days of the Condor for a far greater sense guarantee of satisfactory closure.
• The David Haddas character’s violent death is telegraphed to the viewer without actually showing the face of the actor who takes his seat in the best possible location for the camera to connect mayhem with an overcoat that only belongs to David Haddas in the mind of the viewer due to the dis/misinformative intent of the folks in charge of this show.

I don’t think I’ll play along with this sucker’s game, either.   This show pushes the river.

05 Nov 10 - Posted by Scott Ellington | Uncategorized