If you were a fan of the Bourne films you probably remember them talking about Treadstone every now and then but maybe you don't remember exactly what it was all about. While I am only 4 episodes in, I believe that this series attempts to address those nagging questions that you might have after watching Matt Damon trudge around through several movies.
This is a USA Network production although I have seen, strangely, that Amazon is claiming that it is an exclusive of theirs - which simply isn't true. Maybe they are exclusively streaming it, I'll look into that later.
They don't waste any time of thrusting you into the action as they kind of get straight into it right at the opening bell and especially in the first episode, they keep the action going for basically the entire episode. Things that impressed me was the fight choreography, which was fantastic, as well as the many different languages that are being spoken and how they kind of show, not tell you, that this Treadstone project is global and there are a lot of people involved in its creation.
With Bourne we were given very little information about Treadstone, just that Jason Bourne was a product of it. In this series, Jason Bourne doesn't have anything to do with it although he might end up being mentioned later on. It hasn't happened yet though.
So the story here is that the CIA as well as other organizations like the now defunct KGB, use drugs and hypnosis in order to create these almost super-human sorts of assassins. Many of these killers have no idea that they even have these abilities until the just end up getting triggered by a sound of a catch-phrase which is completely ridiculous, but also entertaining.
What starts out as a bit of an original origin story of Treadstone quickly extends to be all over the globe and if you ask me, I feel as though part of the reason why this series may have failed after 1 season is because they made the scope of it a little too big. We're in North Korea, then we are in USA, then India, then Germany, now were in France and nobody seems to really know what the hell is going on but conveniently, there is always some operative that just happens to be in the right place at the right time for some conflict.
The notions of how someone is able to get weapons and other technology is never addressed and I didn't like this even though I am willing to submit to notions that really powerful people and governments are simply able to make things happen that regular people cannot.
You may recall from the Bourne films though, particularly this one where he is intentionally caught by immigration and customs so he can gain access to real Embassy employees, that Jason Bourne didn't just magically come up with weapons out of the blue, there was some sort of conquest involved in how he obtained them.
I would have much rather they focused on this sort of thing rather than giving us a dozen Bourne-like individuals who are obviously going to collide at some point, although they haven't done so just yet as far as I have gotten.
At first I quite enjoyed the traveling back and forth in time (in the Germany portion of the story) at first, but after a while it kind of became a bit confusing as to where I am in time and space. If you aren't paying really close attention you are going to be lost very quick because out of nowhere they will all of a sudden inexplicably be somewhere like India, even though none of the story has taken place there up to this point. If you weren't watching the screen for that little indicator of where the scene is taking place at that time, you would be completely lost.
perhaps they thought they were going to have a super series here and this is why they introduced so many characters so quickly. Unfortunately for them this very broad scope as far as the narrative was concerned would ultimately be the undoing of the show altogether. It was cancelled after one season and while I haven't gotten to that point yet, I can only presume that there are a ton of untied ends to all the various plotlines of which, there are far too many and there is a general lack of a central cohesive story.
The viewership for this show was never great at just over 600,000 weekly watchers. When the season finale barely managed to get 300,000 viewers it was evident that there was no future in the continuation of the series and it was scrapped.
Should I watch it?
Here's why you should: The action is really top-drawer especially for an experimental series that was done on a network that most people probably wouldn't expect to do something of this scope. The acting is good and the fights are absolutely outstanding. This must have taken a great deal of time to coordinate and it shows. The directing and all of that is quality as well. There are no bad actors in this.
Here is why you shouldn't: Well first off, there is no season 2. After one season that mostly failed back in 2019 nobody was interested in carrying on forward. I think the budget for this was so large that they needed considerably more interest in it in order for it to continue.
Another reason is that the story is confusing as hell and just when you think you have it figured out, they change it. I don't know what the thinking was here, but I believe that most people that watched this show week-by-week would simply forget what the hell they saw the week before because the story is traveling in 10 different directions at any given point in time. This is definitely not a casual watching show.
this can be streamed with an Amazon Prime subscription. It can be purchased as a series on Apple as well as many others for very little money
