A friend emailed me tonight to let me know that the television show “Rubicon” had been canceled. He said he knew it seemed silly, but he was a little down about it, as though he’d lost a friend. Why did he email me? Because he knew I’d feel the same way. We were the only two people we knew who were watching it.

“Rubicon” dealt with a group of government analysts tasked with sifting through reams of data, usually in the form of stacks of reports, to find clues about terrorist strikes. Ultimately, the team finds the source of terrorism against the U.S. — and it turns out to be their own organization. The first (and now last) season ended with the group having perpetrated a terrorist attack of enormous proportions, scuttling U.S. access to oil from the Gulf of Mexico and deeply wounding the U.S. economy. What would have happened next, we’ll never know.

What drew me to the show was its deliberate pacing, and its layers of meaning and characterization. In an age where it’s expected that everyone will be distracted at all times, “Rubicon” insisted that you pay attention. Midway through the season it occurred to me that some of the characters’ odd names must have been anagrams, or clues — and, indeed, I unscrambled “Kale Ingram” into Leak Margin — because he was a leak, and he played the margins. That sort of exploration provided superficial fun; what was more exciting was deciding that Mr. Ingram, who by all evidence could not be trusted, needed to be trusted by the main character, Will Travers, because Travers had nowhere else to turn. And so we were vicariously put into the position of all the characters — making alliances with unfit allies, just as players on the world stage do every day.

I did my bit advocating for the show, and I did manage to get one new person to watch it. “Rubicon”‘s finale claimed just over one million viewers. “Mad Men,” a show that has descended into ludicrousness, netted two-and-a-half million people for its own season finale. In a nation of 300 million people, that’s not that great a difference. While “Mad Men,” somehow, is in the zeitgeist, it didn’t start there; most people climbed onto the show via DVD prior to the second season. I think something similar would have, or could have, happened with “Rubicon.” At the least, I wish AMC had invested in one more season to find out.

I’m not the only one who will miss the show. (Here is Vanity Fair’s Mike Ryan bemoaning the show’s demise.) “Rubicon” was the only show I ever wanted to have a water-cooler conversation about. The problem was that no one else was at the water cooler yet.

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 11th, 2010 at 11:34 pm and is filed under On seeing, Playwriting, Thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.