Unconventional Writing in the Spy Sub Genre

Hello, and welcome back to my series analysis of Patriot.

If you watched my first episode, you may have a clearer understanding of how this show flew under the radar and how you can approach it in a way that allows you to begin to appreciate it. In mentioning this, the goal of this mini-series is to avoid any and all major spoilers. That being said, I’ll only be referencing a couple of moments from the first episode. I’d like to focus a bit on the writing that went into the series. Throughout the duration of the show, there would be a variety of writing credits, but at its core would be Steve Conrad and his production company, Elephant Pictures. This company is responsible for shows like Patriot, Perpetual Grace LTD, and The Structural Dynamics of Flow podcast. In order to address the writing in Patriot, we’d have to look at its genres.

If you ask any number of sources, you’ll see Patriot defined as an aggregate of noir, suspense, comedy, drama, and spy fiction. They’re all correct in one way or another, but the rewards you gain from watching Patriot don’t come from genres or labels, because it was written with the intent to subvert those genres and avoid typical tropes. In an interview with The Writer’s Panel, Steve has a beautiful way of drawing a parallel between this and his high school days as a drummer.

When you’re not the singer, I was a drummer, and the singer’s singing a new song for you for the first time, and the way your energy and your passion just dips like it went off a cliff when he says “desire,” and then you know that he’s going to have behind it “fire,” and then he does, and then it’s all you can do to just keep your arms moving playing the drums because you just don’t care anymore. Well, movies do that. Movies rhyme like that, and we try to find those rhymes in the intelligence and spy subgenre and then try to avoid them.

The formation of predictions based on tropes within the realm of genres leads to stagnation. If you live to watch what you can predict, then why get invested in a world you’re considering pouring countless hours into? Patriot was written with this in mind from the beginning, avoiding that stagnation to keep your audience engaged while maintaining the spontaneity of the writing. It takes a special team of writers to work harmoniously together on a project with the same vision.

We have really simple principles. We don’t start writing until we know the ending, and then we don’t write past the ending, which is an adage that I picked up somewhere which has given us quite a lot, is don’t write past it, get there. To do that hard work of the engineering and the blueprint that you have to make, if you don’t know quite what you’re making, it’s not going to be structurally sound.

We’ve all seen a series or two that continued long past their prime. The simplicity of ending a story can become exponentially convoluted when you have diehard fans that eat, breathe, live, and socialize because of that journey. The discipline for a writer to end their story preserves the integrity of the vision, and that it ended says more about the content of that journey than its lifespan.

Steve goes on to explain a bit more about the approach to writing the series, more specifically three writing elements that he would anticipate from studio notes.

The set of notes everybody’s used to getting from the studio, the studio notes 101, pacing, stakes, tone. Those are the only three things you ever, they’re just different variations of those three notes. I had been doing it long enough that those were, I knew they were coming, and I thought, what if you could make a show that just defied all of the instantly relatable ways to talk about stakes and pacing and tone, like get under them all and turn them inside out.

The pacing of a spy subgenre is contrasted between being steady, methodical, and fast-paced. In the planning phase, our protagonist is calmly briefed by an authority figure, some prototypes or gadgets are shown, and a rendezvous with an agent is arranged. When the plan is executed, the pace picks up and the action is in your face in the form of explosions, fire, fast-moving vehicles, and the near death of our hero in multiple close calls. Regardless of this, the desired outcome is nearly always achieved. In contrast, Patriot’s use of pacing adds to the genre. When John is summoned home and briefed on his mission, there are no gadgets, there is no rendezvous, and the authority figure he’s briefed by is his own father. When the plan is executed, there are no explosions, no showdown, and no close calls. This can be daunting to an audience that’s expecting a spy show.

How many times have you turned on, tuned in, and dropped out while watching? You know the beats of the acts before they appear on the screen. The pace and context of the dialogue cues you in to pay attention. When that rhyme doesn’t conform to what’s expected, and you can’t follow along the first time, it can catch you off guard.

The stakes are on par with that of your typical spy story. Execute your objective in the name of your country by any means necessary, only it’s to buy an election in a foreign country to protect people you personally have no obligation to. Maybe. It’s a possibility. What John is tasked to do is espionage wrapped in what is essentially the equivalent of accounting. Provided everything goes according to plan, he’s not to hurt anyone, defuse a bomb, or infiltrate a missile silo or anything that glamorous. He’s simply instructed to land an interview at a piping company in Milwaukee, do some accounting when he’s in Luxembourg, and occasionally fly to Iran.

The tone of a spy subgenre is typically that of being serious and assertive, unless you’re Austin Powers or Johnny English. Our protagonist is intelligent, sensible, formal, and charismatic in some capacity. They are resilient and persistent in the completion of their mission. In the first frame of Patriot, we see John rushing to get to an interview that he isn’t prepared for. He is humiliated at the head of a table of executives, and we are led to believe he lacks formality, intelligence, charisma, and confidence. All this is based on his tardiness, his response to interview questions, his body language, and the reactions of his interviewing panel. All of this happens within the first two minutes of Patriot.

As we continue to watch, we learn John has depth and isn’t just a cardboard cutout of an already written trope, and you can sense it in how he handles his first obstacle. This only serves as one of the subgenres that Patriot falls under and yet defies. The writers had agreed that the groundwork for Patriot would be suspense, and that if it didn’t add to the genre, it wouldn’t be written in. Therein lies the heart of Patriot, rooted in suspense and looking through the lens of our protagonist, an atypical intelligence officer who is just trying to do the best he can with the cards he’s dealt. It’s when you get to know everyone else in the story that the suspense builds exponentially. The pace is calm and collected, and our stakes as an audience shift from the big picture to the characters we get to see blossom.