As irritating and ultimately depersonalized as the interweb’s invasive personal recommendation pushiness is (“If you like this, you might like this … or this, or this, or this … credit card info here”), it can admittedly be helpful, especially in an age of overabundant options in our quest for products and cultural diversions. In that spirit: If you like TV’s Fargo and Twin Peaks, you might well like Patriot (full series now available on Amazon), which shares with those other private-screen classics certain endearing qualities (if you’re a person who likes that sort of thing). Gotta love the eccentric plot mapping, characters who don’t necessarily come clean or readily explain themselves, and a dry, quirky humor mixed with occasional bursts of ultra-violence (or the hints of afterglow thereof), cohering into a particular and peculiar new brand of gothic dramedy on the tube.
For further practical consumer advice, I would suggest absorbing the labyrinthine Patriot creator Steve Conrad’s nine-episode series binge-style to avoid distraction. (Side note: As of episode six of Twin Peaks, I still don’t really know what’s going on and how the multiple plot strands will eventually come together, and that blissful confusion is part of the addictive beauty). My own travails — and perverse pleasure — in trying to keep the Patriot story straight was hampered by two specific problems: watching episodes sporadically while also checking out episodes of Fargo and Peaks made for a dizzy swirl of characters and plot-tracking fog. Secondly, my dog, Harper, literally ate half of my notes (yes, she ate my homework, no doubt perturbed by the big, light-emitted rectangle in the living room robbing her of attention).
On the plus side, though, these elasticized plot experiments take advantage of New TV’s fluidity and can also foil TV/film writers (and makers of dreaded movie trailers) indulging in the increasingly distressing sin of plot spoilage.