The saddest, funniest spy show ever made is buried on Prime Video

Between shows like The Night Agent, Jack Ryan, and the excellent Slow Horses, TV doesn’t lack for spy dramas. But there’s practically nothing out there like Patriot, a wildly underappreciated two-season drama that is sitting and waiting on Prime Video to be rediscovered. It’s a comedy, it’s a drama, it’s a James Bond movie if James Bond were a lot more easily distracted. You’ve gotta see it to believe it.

Patriot is a different kind of spy show

With a very different kind of spy

Patriot is about John Tavner (Michael Dorman), a spy working for the U.S. government. He’s deeply ambivalent about the violence he has to commit in the course of his work, and deals with his pain by writing and performing extremely specific folk songs about his experiences. As he sings after a particularly traumatizing mission where he accidentally shoots a male hotel maid he mistook for an Egyptian physicist, he’s “showing signs of mental instability” and has “been getting baked, looking up at birds, wondering why there aren’t male hotel maids in other countries.”

John’s handler is a top-ranking CIA official named Tom (Terry O’Quinn), who also happens to be his father. John’s next assignment is to get a job at an industrial piping firm that has projects in Luxembourg and Iran, which will provide him with the cover he needs to smuggle a lot of cash into Luxembourg and hand it off to someone who will then use it to sway the results of an upcoming Iranian election, with the end goal of curtailing Iran’s nuclear capabilities.

Given recent world events, the plot is weirdly relevant, although it’s not the main draw. The reason to watch Patriot is to soak up the very strange vibes and to get to know the crew of misfit, broken people who kind of become a second family for John, since he can’t tell his supportive wife Alice (Kathleen Munroe) about his work.

Patriot doesn’t fall neatly into categories like “drama” or “comedy”

Tell me the image of John running below isn’t at least a little funny

The film critic Roger Ebert said that a movie isn’t about what it’s about, but how it’s about it. Patriot is a great example of that. There is some traditional spy movie stuff here you’ll recognize from any number of other movies and shows, but Patriot keeps throwing curveballs at the audience. There’s a scene where Ravner and a detective (Aliette Opheim) play 50 straight games of rock-paper-scissors, throwing the same symbol every time, for a straight three minutes without any cuts. There’s a bizarrely large number of scenes where sensitive information is shared at urinals. John bombs the interview at the Milwaukee piping firm, so he pushes an applicant who did better than him in front of a bus to ensure that he gets the job, and then spends the rest of the show trying to make sure the guy doesn’t regain his memory.

Everything that can go wrong on John’s missions usually does go wrong. He’s been abused, tortured, and betrayed so many times that he’s gone a little dead behind the eyes, but under everything, his soul still yearns for connection and happiness; we can hear it in his songs, which sometimes turns Patriot into something of a musical. It’s just another flavor for the gumbo.

Is John incompetent? Is he hyper-competent but depressed? Is this just the way spycraft actually works, and we’re expecting too much of him? The show never comes to a firm conclusion, but it sure is interesting to watch.

Patriot never stood a chance

You could make a show like Patriot today, but probably not on Prime Video

Patriot lasted for two seasons. It ends in a way that gives us some sense of closure, but there was clearly more story to tell.

Is there a version of Patriot that went beyond two seasons? It would have to be in an alternate universe where Prime Video didn’t bungle the rollout so badly. The pilot for Patriot ran in November 2015, with the remaining nine episodes of season 1 dropping over a year later, in February 2017. A three-year hiatus before Season 2 killed any momentum the show might have had.

Patriot also went up against heated competition in the form of shows like The Walking Dead, Scandal, How to Get Away with Murder, The Big Bang Theory, and Game of Thrones. The show was offbeat in a way that made it hard to sell, especially when it was up against such juggernauts. In the end, it’s impressive that it lasted as long as it did.

And it probably wouldn’t last that long today, at least not at Prime Video. In the mid-2010s, Prime Video was experimenting with different kinds of programs, producing shows with niche appeal like Mozart in the Jungle, Red Oaks, Transparent, and The Man in the High Castle. These days, Prime Video is more focused on broadly appealing tentpole series like Reacher and The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power. There’s nothing wrong with that, but it’s hard to believe that a show as quirky as Patriot could get a foothold on the streaming service now.

More where this came from

The creator of Patriot, Steven Conrad, would go on to create the show DTF St. Louis, another strangely funny series that defies easy description, for HBO. Patriot may not have gotten the long run it deserved, but if you’re intrigued by the series, there are other shows out there that can scratch that itch.