2023 - 2023
Rabbit Hole landed on Paramount+ in March 2023 and wrapped its eight-episode first season in April the same year. Paramount+ then quietly cancelled it. One and done. A lot of shows on that platform have had the same fate, and this one genuinely had more story to tell.
The hook is Kiefer Sutherland back in paranoid-spy mode for the first time since 24 and Designated Survivor. He plays John Weir, a corporate-espionage-for-hire operator who runs elaborate cons on behalf of Wall Street clients. Weir gets framed for a high-profile murder in the pilot and spends the season trying to unpick a surveillance-state conspiracy that goes deeper than he expected. The creators are John Requa and Glenn Ficarra, the team behind Crazy, Stupid, Love., I Love You Phillip Morris, and This Is Us as executive producers. That is a surprising CV for a paranoid thriller, and you can feel the tonal tension in the finished show. Human beats next to genre machinery. Some of it lands and some of it does not.
One thing to flag upfront. Weir is medicated and haunted by a childhood trauma involving his father. Reality sometimes blurs for him. The show leans on that unreliability more than most thrillers in the genre, which is either a feature or a bug depending on how much patience you have for it. I liked it. My wife wanted the show to commit one way or the other and found the fuzziness frustrating. Your mileage will vary.
Sutherland is the whole pitch. He is doing a different flavour of tightly wound here than he did on 24, more introspective, less shouting at subordinates. Weir is a con artist first and a fugitive second, so the performance leans on cleverness and paranoia rather than action-hero stoicism. It works. Sutherland has not been this comfortable in a role in years.
Charles Dance plays The Intern, a morally ambiguous Dickensian mentor-figure whose identity is the show's central slow-burn reveal. I will not spoil it, but Dance is essentially the engine of the series. He and Sutherland share the best scenes in the show and if you are watching for one reason, it is the mentor dynamic between them. Dance has always been a scene-stealer and the writers lean into that. His monologues are the show at its most alive.
The supporting cast:
Perla Haney-Jardine
Supporting cast
Jason Butler Harner
Crowley
Walt Klink
Young John
Charles Dance
The Intern
Marc Hirschfield
Supporting cast
Kiefer Sutherland
John Weir
Rob Yang
Edward Homm
Mark Winnick
Supporting cast
It is a small ensemble by streaming-thriller standards, which keeps the focus tight on Sutherland and Dance.
On the surface this is a man-on-the-run thriller. Scratch the surface and it is about information warfare. Weir's whole profession is running sophisticated deceptions on corporate targets. The villains are doing the same thing but at the scale of democracy itself. The show is asking what happens when everyone you meet could be an operator running a script on you, and whether free choice exists in a world where your inputs are curated. That is a genuinely current question and the show treats it seriously.
It is also, quietly, a story about a son and his father. The Dance arc runs in parallel to the conspiracy plot and carries more weight than the corporate villainy. Weir's childhood hangs over every decision he makes, and the show is more interested in that emotional through-line than in paying off every conspiracy beat. That is probably why some critics bounced off the plot reveals. The writers were working on a different frequency. They cared more about what Weir felt than about whether the mechanics of the conspiracy fully held up.
Requa and Ficarra shoot this in a clean, modern-paranoia register. Glass offices. Dark Brooklyn streets. A lot of surveillance-camera POV shots and screens-within-screens. The flashbacks to Weir's childhood are given a warmer, softer palette that contrasts hard with the present-day scenes. When reality starts slipping for Weir, the camera language slips with him. Nothing showy, nothing Mr. Robot levels of formal experimentation, but competent and atmospheric.
The action sequences are low-key. This is not 24 or Reacher. It is closer in feel to Slow Horses or The Old Man, where intelligence work is grubby and full of people lying to each other in restaurants. The few genuine setpieces the show offers are shot with restraint rather than bombast.
Critics rated Rabbit Hole mid. The Sutherland-and-Dance double act got the praise it deserved. The plot mechanics, which rely on twists stacking on twists, got the criticism they probably deserved too. Audiences on Paramount+ did not show up in the numbers the platform wanted. Paramount+ has a well-documented audience problem, and this was one of several mid-tier 2023 originals that could not break out.
A smart, unshowy paranoid thriller that lives and dies on its two leads. It earns its place on the watchlist.
The cancellation is the frustrating part. The season one finale sets up a much bigger second season and there is no second season. That is the show's real legacy on the platform, and it sits alongside Tehran, Treadstone, and a handful of other paranoid-thriller entries that hit a wall on audience reach. Good shows with an audience problem rather than a quality problem.
I came to Rabbit Hole expecting another forgettable Paramount+ misfire and left more impressed than I expected to be. Sutherland knows exactly what this kind of role is, and Dance elevates every scene he is in. The conspiracy plot is too clever for its own good at times, but the central relationship is genuine and earned.
If you want the thriller canon laid out for reference: this sits closer to Slow Horses and The Old Man than to Reacher or The Terminal List. It shares DNA with Homeland on the paranoia axis and with Jack Ryan and The Night Agent on the framed-agent axis, but it is weirder and more character-driven than any of those.
Current Standing: {{show:rabbit-hole:rank_full}} Woke Rating: {{show:rabbit-hole:woke}}/5
Cancelled too soon. Worth watching anyway. Sutherland and Dance alone justify the eight hours.
One last note. If you went off Sutherland during the later seasons of 24, give him another shot here. He is older, quieter, and better for it. That alone is worth eight episodes of your time.
Enid Graham
Valence
Meta Golding
Hailey Winton
Glenn Ficarra
Creator / Executive Producer
John Requa
Creator / Executive Producer