The official reasons that studios give for why a series wasn't green-lit for a second season is usually some sort of what I like to call PRBS (public relations bull shit) and they never really address root issues such as it just being poorly done. Nobody will ever admit to that sort of thing although it is so often the main reason why something gets cancelled.
Obviously, even shows you or I might think are bad can carry on if people are watching them, but in the case of Treadstone, not that may people really turned up to watch it in the first place, which is surprising given how much of a hit most of the Bourne movies were.
This brings me to what I believe was the first, and perhaps the biggest problem with the entire thing.
They didn't really tie in the Bourne franchise as much as I think they should have
Maybe there was some legal reason why this was the case but seeing as how all of those movies combined made $1.6 BILLION at the box office with an estimated total of $500 million in production costs.
It seems like a ton of people would watch this if they realized that it was Bourne related but most people probably don't remember that Treadstone was the organization behind all the problems in the films and therefore didn't make the connection.
USA Network is a rather weak network
That being the case this was probably a really huge gamble for USA Network considering that when you do watch the show, you can tell that a lot of money was spent on these episodes. I don't know how much but watch one or two episodes and you will see what I am talking about. This is a good quality production including and especially the CGI.
The fights are pretty great but if I was to have one criticism it would be the overuse of the "shaky cam" to conceal the lack of actual contact in the various brawls. It's still pretty great though. This is actually a high point of the entire series. The action is pretty damn solid. Unfortunately this is one of the few thumbs up I can give this series
Too many super-soldier characters
Why was Bourne so great? Well a big part of it was because we were focused on just one super-soldier for the most part. In Treadstone there are just so many of them to the point where it kind of loses all meaning as far as believing that these are rare projects where people were conditioned in ultra-secret environments for some sort of Black Ops something or other with the CIA or whoever the hell we are even meant to believe is behind this.
They keep adding more people as the series goes along too and they get increasingly ridiculous as far as their physical attributes are concerned too.
I'm not saying that I believe that Matt Damon's character would be capable of winning fist-fights with 12 people at the same time either, but when you stick multiple barely 100-pound women into this role it starts to lose all of its credibility. I'm not trying to be sexist here but a female secret agent would possibly be able to gain access better than a man could, but that is kind of where the advantages would end.
While this was on my mind, I was watching this show with some women as well, and they were the first to point it out about how ridiculous these scenarios were.
Some really horrible typical action fails are in it
Let me list off a few things that happen in so many action films that when it does happen it is so cliche that you want to facepalm
- Someone gets shot in the stomach and left for dead. This NEVER actually kills someone and they ALWAYS end up coming back
- A guide of some sort that has been smuggling along a certain route for years suddenly becomes useless and now our secret agent has to fend for themselves. Which they are better at than he was even though they don't even know where they are
- Some really convenient situations where characters fast travel to be somewhere at a certain time even though it is impossible that they would be able to cover that distance in such a short amount of time.
there's more but honestly, this is enough
The story is all over the place
I think maybe this happened because the showrunners were convinced they were going to have a long-standing success on their hands and they needed to establish something HUGE so that they could focus on so many things as time went by. What actually ended up happening is that the few people that actually bothered watching this got frustrated and confused as to what the hell is going on and probably just gave up on it. The first episode of the one and only season managed half a million viewers (which is pretty fantastic for USA Network) but by the time it was ending they were getting less than 200,000.
That's not enough and I feel it was largely because the scope was too big.
We have situations occurring in 70 years ago and things happening today. They also throw in a few things that happened in-between to establish Treadstone as some sort of evil thing that got out of control. If you aren't paying really close attention you lose track of where you are in time and space and combine this with too many characters and the fact that these episodes were released week-by-week initially and you have a very confused audience.
Pretty poor dialogue choices, in multiple languages
some of the dialogue is just so cringe that I can't believe it made it through to the final cut. Who's running these things seriously? The amount of times that people in this show are completely unfamiliar with what "cicadas" even are is just a lot more upsetting to me than it should be. Who doesn't know what cicadas are? This was especially annoying when the people who have never heard of this word are really successful and presumably intelligent heads of some sort of agency.
I don't know what is going on with writers these days but there seems to be a real lack of actual talent going on there.
This is my opinion of course, but I think it is a pretty objective statement to say that people in high-ranking positions are going to possess a great breadth of knowledge about all things, including strange insects.
Cable was already dead at the time it was released
This series was released in 2019, which isn't covered by the above graph but high-budget series were kind of the last stand for cable companies in those days and nobody (except for maybe AMC) was succeeding in fighting streaming, the giant whose victory was inevitable.
USA never stood a chance in regards to drama or action series, and almost nobody else did either. USA and many others have pivoted to streaming partnerships themselves because they saw the writing on the wall. This Treadstone project might have been one of their final tries at fighting the behemoth that was streaming and it shouldn't be all that surprising that they failed.
Treadstone was a series that could have been great but through a combination of a lot of things it just really didn't work out. Also, I don't think that anyone else will bother to revitalize this same series even though it wasn't really "finished." The actors and actresses are too much older now and nobody really connected with them in the first place anyway.
I think this is likely on the lips of some producers out there somewhere, but it may just be too risky at this point to try to do it. Hell, Even The Bourne Legacy which was a pretty fantastic film, did poorly and barely broke even after marketing costs and many attribute this to the entire system kind of needing Matt Damon to have it work. Maybe they will do that.
I had previously said that Treadstone was worth watching, but now after getting through it I don't really think that I believe that anymore. Sorry if I lead anyone down a bad path.
