Spurv Plinths

On the 10th anniversary of the short-lived, darkly funny Amazon series, creator Steven Conrad and stars Kurtwood Smith and Terry O’Quinn reflect on what made it special

How best to explain Patriot? The cult-favorite spy series, which premiered 10 years ago this week on Amazon and ran for two seasons, follows CIA operative John Tavner (Michael Dorman, years before his turn as a lovelorn astronaut on For All Mankind) as he goes undercover at a mundane piping manufacturer in Milwaukee. As the pilot lays out, his mission is, in theory, simple: Get hired at the piping company, join the team on a regularly scheduled work trip to Luxembourg, and make a covert cash handoff there with an Iranian agent who will help secure a more U.S.-friendly regime.

Tonally, though, beneath the coat of tradecraft and international intrigue, the show is about as far from The Americans as you can get. John’s mission goes rapidly awry with a veritable Rube Goldberg machine of oft-absurd speed bumps, including a CIA goof that gives his false Wisconsin identity one too many Social Security Number digits; John’s PTSD dating from a previous job gone bad (and the marijuana dependency he developed while recuperating); and a no-nonsense taskmaster boss (played with malicious aplomb by Kurtwood Smith). *Patriot *is less interested in dead drops than it is in charting John’s plodding march into morally gray situations and mounting depression. It’s also very, very funny: One way that John copes is by turning up at open mic nights to perform gloomy folk songs with little concern for OPSEC. In what is likely the former Iranian president’s only appearance in a singer-songwriter ballad, one lyric has John crooning about the day the United States learned that “Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was fucking around with new centrifuges.” Later in the song, he sings, “I’m showing several signs of increasing mental instability.”

Created by Steven Conrad, best known for writing dreary yet whimsical films like The Pursuit of Happyness and The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, *Patriot *never managed to capture an audience during its all-too-short run. But through the power of rewatches it has won a passionate fandom in the years since. Hilarious, bleak, and bizarre, it represents the spirit of Peak TV: the distillation of an auteur’s singular vision in a brief moment of if-you-build-it-they-will-come studio optimism.

Editor’s picks

“I pitched it to Amazon, and at the time they had an appetite for a show like that,” says Conrad, who admits the concept was a bit of a bait-and-switch from the start. “I think they were banking that the spy genre was going to do a little more legwork than the show that we all privately had in mind.”

In the decade since its debut, that sneakily idiosyncratic show with oddball plots and winning performances by beloved characters has slowly but surely made its mark. It sports a bustling subreddit and ongoing word-of-mouth recruits to the fandom. And lately, Prime’s recommendations algorithm seems to have taken a shine to it — perhaps mistaking it for a sharp spy game as its human predecessors did, or perhaps not. (Prime declined to comment.) For viewers and those who had a hand in making the show, the only regret is that there isn’t more Patriot to devour.

“It was all just a real delight,” says Smith, whose cantankerous piping executive had, what else, a dark past. Of Patriot’s 2019 cancellation, he says, “I have not forgiven Amazon for this.”

PATRIOT ARRIVED COURTESY of Prime’s short-lived Pilot Season program, then the cornerstone of the streamer’s eager investment in original programming. Pilot Season, which launched in 2013, was an attempt to add a viewer-forward sheen to Hollywood’s traditional buffet of inaugural episodes. Instead of studio execs making the call on whether to send a given program to series, it was up to viewers, who were offered a full slate of freshman episodes from new shows and asked to share their feedback on what they hoped to see more of. Though the program launched some notable hits — among them The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, Transparent, and *The Man in the High Castle *— it would last just five years.

Related Content

But in the lead-up to 2015, the studio was still taking big swings. “Ten years ago, the nature of this business was a little different,” Conrad says. “You could feel that the feature [film] landscape had changed and become primarily IP and superhero movies. TV had a depth then, and an ambition, on the heels of very successful long-term shows like Sopranos and Mad Men. You could just feel that becoming kind of a new art form.”

Espionage thrillers were good business, then and now, but some of Patriot’s layered complexity is a reflection of the TV of the time. When I asked Terry O’Quinn, who played Tom Tavner — John’s father and the senior CIA officer who keeps sending his increasingly battered son into the field — about its initial billing as a spy drama, he told me he’d never thought of the show that way. “It’s kind of a family drama,” he says. Indeed, both Tom and John’s brother (Michael Chernus) are called in to assist with problems ranging from the meddling of an overqualified Luxembourgish detective to an ill-timed run-in with a puppeteer.

Smith’s cantankerous piping executive glares at Dorman’s depressed spy. Elizabeth Morris/Prime video

Patriot resists easy characterization chiefly because of Conrad’s writing, which gives his characters strange rhythms and, sometimes, even stranger verbiage. (Conrad, who regularly performs in a band around the L.A. area, also wrote the show’s soundtrack, including John’s brooding folk songs.) “Every week or week and a half when we would get a new script, it was like Christmastime,” Smith says. He remembers getting the script for one early episode from Conrad, who cautioned that Smith’s character, Leslie Claret, would be delivering a speech that Conrad wanted to film as a “oner” — a single, long shot, with his character on camera nearly the entire time. No problem, thought Smith. Then he read the script.

As part of a pep talk ahead of an important pitch in Luxembourg, Leslie — who in the Patriot universe wrote a seminal piping textbook called *The Integral Principles of the Structural Dynamics of Flow *— gathers his team around him. “Keep it simple,” he starts, before diving into a monologue that includes the promise that “using a field of half-seized sprats and brass-fitted nickel slits, our bracketed caps and splay-flexed brace columns vent dampers to dampening hatch depths of one-half meter from the damper crown to the spurv plinth.”

“I said, ‘Steve, does this mean anything? Where did you get all this?’” Smith says. “And he said, ‘No, it doesn’t mean anything. They’re all words and expressions that I found in various places having to do with piping. But no, put together it means nothing.’”

To memorize it, Smith invented meanings for all those nickel slits and spurv plinths to give the speech at least some false cohesion. He then spent a month devoting an hour or two every morning to rehearsing it, with another session later in the day with an assistant. In the end, the scene was filmed in just two attempts — with the second necessary only because of a camera error. When the episode premiered at the Berlin Film Festival, the speech got a standing ovation.

Still, the overall response to the show was muted. Despite getting picked up for a full season after a favorable response during Pilot Season, reviews were scarce and middling. “Amazon’s Patriot is a good example of how ‘peak TV’ inspires over-confidence in old ideas,” The Verge declared, before lamenting that “prestige television has gotten sort of out of control.” Comparisons to the work of the Coen brothers were rampant and not always positive.

The show chugged along nonetheless, gradually attracting fans who adored its stark cinematography and weirdo colloquialisms. (If you watch it, you are unlikely ever to think about the word “cool” the same way again.) “I’ve had people come up [to me] and they seem to either really love it or they didn’t know anything at all about it,” says O’Quinn. The actor is most often recognized for his role as John Locke on Lost, but the fans who know him as Tom Tavner are especially fervent. “The people who were turned on to it seemed to be crazy about it.”

PATRIOT WAS RENEWED for a second season, which debuted in 2018. Filming took the cast and crew to Paris for a whopping five months. One day of shooting left Smith and O’Quinn, who had become fast friends, riding the Metro for hours on end. O’Quinn remembers confiding to Smith that if it were up to him, he’d just keep on doing Patriot and then retire. “We’re both of a certain age,” O’Quinn recalls saying at the time. “If I could just do this for five or six more years and call it a day, I’d be pretty happy.”

But Patriot was not to have a long life. Conrad says that he knew the show’s days were numbered midway through the Paris shoot, and that John’s story should be wrapped up as cleanly as possible: “I could read the writing on the wall. I had every sense that we weren’t going to have a Season Three.”

By the time the show was officially canceled in 2019, Peak TV was already contracting and Prime in particular was going through a period of executive tumult. “There were three different presidents of the studio while we were making that show,” Conrad says. “Even in this business, that’s a lot of turnover.” (O’Quinn likens the rotating executives and resulting fallout to “a pride of lions — when a new lion comes in, they kill all the babies.”)

The changes at Prime meant that Patriot had no champion at the studio level; it got to feeling, Conrad says, like “the show doesn’t belong to anybody.” But he believes that the series benefitted from that dynamic in some ways, too, skating through production receiving fewer studio notes than you might expect for a show that often pairs wanton violence with deadpan slapstick. “It was a little more ‘ours’ than is ordinary because of all that,” he says.

Though it hasn’t been so long since its cancellation, it’s hard to imagine a show with such an eccentric approach getting the green light today, never mind that kind of creative freedom in production. “When we first started, it was, ‘This is the way television should be,’” says Smith. “We’re not worrying about ratings and this and that. We’re doing something that’s good, and hoping that, eventually, people will watch a lot of it. But the idea creatively is to build a good product. And then that changed, just in the time that we were doing this show.”

“That’s the sad commentary on American television, or maybe television in general, because it has to hit the middle of the target,” O’Quinn says. “It can’t be on the perimeter. And Steven writes — he lives on the perimeter.”

The Patriot creative trust, for its part, is still going strong. Conrad has penned a real-life version of the Structural Dynamics of Flow and written episodes of a surreal podcast voiced by Smith’s character, which Smith says he recorded in a closet at home filled with hats for sound dampening. Conrad is a creator who tends to draw from a recurring stable of actors in all his works, and many Patriot cast members have popped up in his more recent projects, like 2019’s spiritually similar thriller series Perpetual Grace, LTD and 2021’s stop-motion animated series Ultra City Smiths. The upcoming HBO limited series, DTF St. Louis, which Conrad created and directed, will feature his brother, Chris, a memorable piping colleague from Patriot.

I spoke with Conrad, O’Quinn, and Smith at a difficult time for the Patriot team: Last month, Chicago artist Tony Fitzpatrick, who played a delightfully dreadful security guard named Jack Birdbath in Patriot, died. As the news broke, Patriot alumni found themselves calling and texting one another from around the world, sharing memories of Fitzpatrick and their time working with him. “We lost Jack,” Conrad says. “But somehow, knowing that 10 years later, everybody still cares about each other that way, enough so that we all stopped what we were doing and we all found each other — we’re all going to find each other again someday on something else.”

Trending Stories

On his birthday last year, Smith sat back and wondered what he should do to celebrate. Then he landed on an idea: He would rewatch Patriot with his wife. He’d seen it before, of course, back when it was newly out, but that was different. “You know exactly what’s coming, and you’re hoping that this scene works, or that works,” he says. “You’ve got all those things going on in your head, and you’re not just sitting there watching.”

This time, though? He laughed and laughed. “We watched several episodes, and I was so knocked out by the way things were put together,” he says. “I just thought it was great.”