By Gary Levin, USA TODAYThe series, a throwback to the early 1970s era of paranoia-fueled drama (The Parallax View, Three Days of the Condor), centers on the American Policy Institute, a government front charged with sifting through data gathered from intelligence agencies about potential threats.
After a mysterious suicide early in Sunday's premiere (8 ET/PT), Will Travers (James Badge Dale) is promoted to team leader of his unit, which seeks patterns in seemingly mundane details.
But he's also investigating a broader conspiracy that raises questions about his employer and his mission. And Travers is weighed down by the death of his wife and daughter on 9/11. "He had a happy, healthy life. He was a college professor, had a beautiful wife and child, and then — catastrophe," Dale says.
Executive producer Henry Bromell (Homicide, Brotherhood) took over the project from creator Jason Horwitch (The Pentagon Papers) and brought his own background to bear. His dad is a retired 30-year CIA veteran who toted his family around Middle East hotspots. (Bromell wrote a fictional account of his childhood, the 2002 novel Little America.)
Dale co-starred in HBO's The Pacific but is familiar to fans of Fox's just-canceled 24 as Agent Chase Edmunds, who had his shackled hand chopped off to contain a deadly virus in the third season.
"We take our time here," he says during a break between scenes. "We're not blowing things up. The danger here is in the quiet moments, the idea that somebody's watching you at all times."
Rubicon is a cerebral version of the conspiracy thriller. Early episodes are light on chases and gunplay, and instead focus on parsing clues to both API's missions and the wider conspiracy. And like those earlier movies, the series takes a decidedly low-tech approach in which analysts sift through piles of documents.
"We've had some cop shows in which guys sneak around alleys, but never had one about brainy guys who sort through reams of data and try to find patterns," Bromell says. "They're afraid if they screw up, there will be another 9/11, so the burnout rate is high. It's really hard to let your sense of responsibility go."
Dale, Bromell says, is "wonderfully convincing as an intellectual. The character has to be very verbal because he's very smart. On the other hand, by inclination he's not a man of many words."
Rubicon is the third regular series in AMC's renaissance, following Breaking Bad and Mad Men, which it precedes on Sundays. But Bad was developed at FX, while Mad was famously first rejected by HBO; Rubicon is homegrown, dreamed up by the network's programmers.
Resolution to the conspiracy is promised in the first 13 episodes. "By the end of the first season, the viewer will know 90% of what's behind everything, but that's going to flip into something else," Bromell says. "So it's not like it's over."
Says Dale, "There comes a breaking point," a reference to the title, a river in Italy crossed by Julius Caesar that marks a point of no return. "Will makes a decision that affects everything."
As Travers engages in a cat-and-mouse game with pursuers late in the season, he hides out with a neighbor (Annie Parisse) in scenes being filmed here. Dale, who began to question his character's sanity, had to take a few days off, Bromell says: "He was starting to doubt everything in his brain" about the show's plot.
All this surveillance, Dale says, makes him nervous. "I started looking over my shoulder since we started filming."
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