The blandly reassuring ‘Jack Ryan’ gets better when there’s less Jack Ryan in it
With a president who routinely insults the U.S. intelligence community and fumbles basic respect protocols for deceased war heroes, it’s tempting to run straight into the arms of a newfangled Jack Ryan, that adaptively macho CIA wonk turned field operative who was dreamed up decades ago by the late espionage thrillerist Tom Clancy.
How’s he still single, you Georgetown ladies ask? PTSD, my dears - nightmare sweats, Afghanistan flashbacks, shrapnel scars, that sort of thing. The shirtlessness keeps you understandably intrigued, because finally — a true-blue American with security clearance is here to save us from all this. It’s Rambo minus the jingo. It’s the abs plus the IQ. It’s John Brennan with hair.
In the Jack Ryan ideal, one gets that reassuring sense of highly classified work accomplished against desperate odds, in search of no glory and centered on the stable, shopworn fiction of the good Catholic Baltimore boy and exMarine with a doctorate in economics who becomes a Langley brainiac. He rises early each morning to row the Potomac past misty symbols of democracy, and works late each night to ferret out the encrypted international banking transactions of overseas terrorists.
It’s only a matter of time before he’s in the thick of it, ambushed in Yemen while trying to prevent an ISIS offshoot group from carrying out a dastardly master plan (something having to do with unleashing an Ebola pandemic).
That, at least, sums up the tempting bait that lures one to Amazon’s eight-episode “Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan,” an explosive yet noticeably flavorless take on Clancy’s man of action from creators Carlton Cuse (“Lost”; “Bates Motel”) and Graham Roland (“Fringe”). It premiered Friday and has already been renewed for a second season.
John Krasinski, whom some viewers will persist in seeing as Jim Halpert, good-humored boyfriend supreme from “The Office,”assumes the role previously played on the big screen by Alec Baldwin, Harrison Ford, Ben Affleck and, in prequel form, Chris Pine.
Suffice to say, actionheroics are not Krasinski’s forte, and much of what this Jack Ryan grapples and grunts with wouldn’t interest Carrie Mathison of “Homeland,” even on an unmedicated day. In the first few paint-by-numbers episodes, “Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan” seems woefully behind on presentday requirements for counterterrorism TV dramas; a prefab protagonist and slow-boil plot just won’t cut it. DirecTV’s “Condor,” which aired earlier this year, solved its dullhero problem with a steady drip of adrenaline. “Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan” relies too much on a guy who’s a steady drip.
To their credit, Cuse and Roland are more interested in their hero as a workin-progress, contrasting Ryan’s lack of field experience with his naive certainty of right and wrong. While chatting up an attractive epidemiologist, Cathy Mueller (Abbie Cornish), at an outdoor party of Washington swells, Ryan is plucked away by a helicopter; when he returns from that mission and asks her out on a proper date, she’s already done her research on him.
“You’re too good for your own good,” Cathy tells Jack.
“Is that even a thing?” he replies. “What does that even mean?”
“Moralistic, self-righteous,” she says.
Yes, these are his big flaws, and he soon discovers that being correct is not always an asset in the war on terror and being American does not guarantee a spot on the moral high ground — a reckoning that the show, and Krasinski, clumsily portray. For example, in a scene in which Jack is unable to disguise his distaste for the moral shiftiness of an agency asset (Numan Acar) in Turkey who happens to run a drug den and whorehouse.
“You don’t like me,” the man tells Jack. “You think you’re the good guy and I’m the bad guy. Maybe you’re right. But maybe if I was born in a nice city in America, I could be the good guy, too. Geography is destiny, my friend. The world is the kiln and we are the clay.”
“Wow,” Jack replies. “Let me write that down.”
It’s tempting to stick this Jack Ryan where he belongs: on your dad’s bookshelf of hardcovers. That’s why it’s sort of remarkable, halfway in, to watch as the creators and writers step in to prevent “Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan” (I keep repeating the full title because I find the fealty to franchise ownership kind of hilarious) from becoming just another action drama about a white American hero vs. the bad brown people.
The series spends an uncommon, yet commendable, amount of time and effort telling the backstory of the show’s villain, Mousa bin Suleiman (Ali Suliman), who survived a 1983 U.S. bomber attack in Lebanon and becomes radicalized as a young man in a French prison. Frightened by her husband’s terrorist leanings and the safety of their children, his wife, Hanin (Dina Shihabi), makes a choice to flee with their daughters. The story of their escape is more interesting than anything going on back at Langley.
At the same time, and in an equally compelling way, “Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan” occasionally segues to the side story of a morose drone pilot, Victor Polizzi ( John Magaro), who drops bombs on war zones from a high-tech situation command at an Air Force base in Nevada. Riddled with guilt over the casualties associated with his missed targets, he sets off for Syria to make amends. While it may not have been the creators’ intent, “Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan” gets a whole lot better - and more modern, relevant and thoughtful - when Jack Ryan isn’t in it.