Review of Patriot

Thankfully, this is anything but a paint-by-numbers action series about spies starring somebody like Chuck Norris. This is a quietly hilarious black comedy about the snowballing consequences of acting on inaccurate intelligence information. It's not funny in a slapstick, goofy, unrealistic way like Get Smart of Spy Hard. It's more like Breaking Bad. The comedy surprises you by putting our hero, an intelligence agent, in absurdly bungled situations. These are usually not his fault and almost always made worse by what he has to do to carry out his mission. Shellshocked by what his trusted colleagues' mistakes (maybe even outright incompetence) have put him through, he puts his sadness into autobiographical musical lyrics for folk songs. He plays these with his guitar on park benches and coffee houses in countries where, hopefully, people who hear them won't understand English and rat him out.

His father, a distinguished former Congressman now working for the State Department as his boss, his brother, a loyal but childlike successor to his father's Texas Congressional seat, and his faraway wife help him along and keep him from quitting, getting arrested, or losing his mind. I can't describe to you how much I laughed in the first ten minutes of this pilot or how much I look forward to seeing the rest of them when they're finished. This is something new and unique like (as another reviewer mentioned) the first Coen brothers movie I ever saw. You don't know what's going to happen next, but you know it's going to be wickedly entertaining.