Patriot appeared on Amazon in February 2015 with almost no marketing and a title that actively discouraged discovery. The name suggests jingoistic action. The show delivers something closer to a Coen Brothers film stretched across eighteen episodes, a story about a man named John Tavner who works as an intelligence operative for his father and who is, by any reasonable measure, falling apart. He’s been assigned to go undercover at a Milwaukee industrial piping company in order to facilitate a covert operation involving Iranian elections. He’s also profoundly depressed, writing folk songs about his classified missions, and increasingly incapable of maintaining the various lies his life requires.
Creator Steve Conrad built something that defies categorization. The show is a spy thriller with real stakes and real violence. It’s a workplace comedy set in a mundane corporate environment. It’s a family drama about fathers and sons and the damage that duty inflicts on both. It’s a study of depression so accurate that viewers who have experienced it report feeling seen in a way no other show has managed. It manages to be all of these things without any of them feeling subordinate to the others, which is a feat of tonal control that borders on the miraculous.
The show found its audience slowly, through word of mouth and critical advocacy, but that audience was never large enough to justify its continuation. Amazon cancelled it after two seasons, and the passionate community that loved it has spent the years since trying to get other people to watch it, hampered by the same problem that plagued the show from the start: how do you describe something this strange to someone who hasn’t experienced it?
A Precision Machine Built from Absurdity
The writing operates with a structural sophistication that becomes apparent over time. Events that seem random in early episodes turn out to be carefully planted setups for payoffs that arrive hours later. Throwaway lines become crucial plot points. Background details become foreground stories. Conrad constructs his narratives like Rube Goldberg machines where every piece connects to every other piece, and the pleasure of watching these connections reveal themselves is one of the show’s deepest satisfactions.
The lead performance is a masterclass in understatement. John Tavner moves through the world with a flat affect that masks an ocean of pain, and the performance captures that specific quality of depression where everything requires enormous effort but must appear effortless. The comedy often emerges from the gap between what John is feeling and what he’s able to express, and from the increasingly absurd situations his cover identity forces him into.
The supporting cast populates the world with characters who are simultaneously comic creations and fully realized people. John’s brother, a politician navigating his own impossible situation, provides the show’s emotional anchor. His handler at the piping company, a man of cheerful obliviousness, generates consistent laughs while also serving as a commentary on the banality that intelligence work must coexist with. The ensemble grows across both seasons, and nearly every addition enriches the show’s web of interconnected stories.
The folk songs John writes about his missions are one of the show’s most distinctive elements. They function as confession, therapy, and security risk simultaneously, and they’re surprisingly good songs that carry emotional weight independent of their narrative function. These musical interludes could easily feel gimmicky, but they work because they emerge organically from John’s character and his desperate need to process experiences he’s forbidden from discussing.
The Burden of Patience Required
Patriot’s first few episodes are its biggest barrier to entry. The show’s deliberate pace and deadpan tone can read as flatness if you’re not attuned to what it’s doing, and the spy plot moves slowly enough in the early going that it’s easy to wonder where everything is headed. The show rewards patience enormously, but it asks for more patience than many viewers are willing to give, particularly in an era of abundant alternatives.
The violence, when it arrives, is sudden and disorienting in ways that can clash with the show’s comedic elements. Conrad refuses to let violence be casual or entertaining, which is admirable but occasionally jarring. Some sequences shift tone so abruptly that they feel like they belong to a different show, and while this is clearly intentional, representing John’s experience of a world where horror intrudes without warning, it can be difficult to process.
The second season introduces plot complications that occasionally feel like they’re multiplying faster than the show can manage. New characters and new storylines create a density that threatens to overwhelm the intimate character study at the show’s center. The season ultimately holds together, but there are episodes where the machinery of the plot overshadows the human elements that make the show special.
The cancellation means the story is incomplete. The second season ends in a place that functions as an ending of sorts, but it’s clearly not the conclusion Conrad planned, and viewers who become invested in John’s journey will feel the absence of resolution.
Depression as Operating System
The most remarkable thing about Patriot is how it portrays depression not as a condition to be overcome but as a lens through which the entire world is experienced. John’s flat affect isn’t a symptom that the plot will eventually cure. It’s the medium through which he processes everything: love, duty, violence, humor, connection. The show doesn’t pathologize this or sentimentalize it. It simply presents a depressed person navigating a world that continues to make demands regardless of his capacity to meet them.
This treatment of mental illness distinguishes Patriot from virtually everything else on television. There’s no therapy breakthrough, no medication montage, no moment of catharsis that signals healing. There’s just a person doing his best within the constraints of a mind that doesn’t work the way he needs it to, surrounded by people who either can’t see his suffering or don’t know what to do about it.
Should You Watch Patriot?
Patriot is essential for anyone who loves television that takes genuine creative risks and who appreciates comedy that emerges from pain rather than from punchlines. If you respond to the Coen Brothers’ blend of absurdity and violence, if you value structural sophistication in storytelling, if you’ve ever felt that a show truly understood something about your own experience that you’d never seen represented before, this might be that show for you.
Skip it if deadpan humor doesn’t work for you or if you need a complete story with a satisfying conclusion. Patriot demands patience, tonal flexibility, and a willingness to sit with discomfort from its viewers, and it doesn’t apologize for any of it.
The Verdict
Patriot is one of those rare shows that inspires outright evangelism. The people who love it tend to love it with an intensity that reflects how personal the show feels, how specifically it captures experiences and emotions that television usually handles with less precision and less courage. Steve Conrad created something wholly original, funny and heartbreaking in equal measure, constructed with an intelligence that reveals itself gradually and rewards repeated viewing. Its cancellation is a loss, but what exists across eighteen episodes is more than enough to demonstrate that this was something extraordinary.