2019 - 2020
Treadstone ran on USA Network from October 15, 2019 to January 7, 2020. Ten episodes. One season. Then the plug got pulled and most of the storylines were left hanging in mid-air.
The premise is the bold bit. This is the Bourne film universe transplanted into a television structure, with the same CIA black ops program that trained Jason Bourne now opened up to a multi-thread ensemble. Operation Treadstone, the behaviour-modification protocol that turned ordinary people into sleeper assassins, is the hook the entire show hangs on. Matt Damon is nowhere to be seen. Alfred Molina is nowhere to be seen. Paul Greengrass's grip-shaky camera is, mostly, nowhere to be seen. What you get instead is a USA Network attempt to franchise the Bourne Identity / Bourne Supremacy / Bourne Ultimatum film DNA into something that could run for years.
It did not run for years. It ran for ten episodes and stopped.
Created by Tim Kring (the Heroes guy) and showrun by Graham Roland (who went on to do Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan), Treadstone was USA Network's last big-swing attempt at prestige IP in a late-2010s era that already saw the network losing its footing. Ratings were middling. Reviews were mixed. The cancellation came in May 2020 and the show has not been revived since.
No Bourne. No Conklin. No returning faces from the films. Treadstone casts fresh and asks you to buy into new operatives across multiple eras. Results vary.
Jeremy Irvine plays J. Randolph Bentley, a Treadstone agent activated in 1973 North Korea. The Bentley strand is the one most critics singled out as genuinely Bourne-like. Irvine brings a cold competence that the franchise has always traded on. Brian J. Smith plays Doug McKenna, a tectonic engineer in present-day North Dakota who has no idea he is a sleeper asset until something inside him switches on. It is the show's most human plotline and its most quietly effective one.
Emilia Schüle plays Petra Andropov, a Soviet-trained agent whose 1979 conditioning catches up with her in modern Paris. Tracy Ifeachor plays Tara Coleman, a British intelligence operative pulling at the thread from a different angle. Omar Metwally is Sebastien De Jean, a handler whose loyalties you are meant to keep guessing about. Gabrielle Scharnitzky plays Dr. Meisner, the cold architect of the 1970s program and the closest thing the show has to a recurring antagonist. Michelle Forbes, always a welcome presence, is CIA veteran Ellen Becker investigating the rogue activations from Langley. Patrick Fugit rounds out the ensemble as Matt Edwards.
"Irvine is the closest thing Treadstone has to a genuine Bourne heir. Ice in his veins, violence as craft."
Jeremy Irvine
J. Randolph Bentley
Graham Roland
Showrunner / Executive Producer
Emilia Schüle
Petra Andropov
Gabrielle Scharnitzky
Dr. Meisner
Tracy Ifeachor
Tara Coleman
Brian J. Smith
Doug McKenna
Tim Kring
Creator / Executive Producer
Omar Metwally
Sebastien De Jean
Some of the performances land. Some feel like they are still searching for the show they belong to. That unevenness is a symptom of the multi-thread structure, which was always going to live or die on whether the threads braided cleanly.
On paper, Treadstone is a spy show about sleeper agents waking up. In practice, it is a show about the architecture of state violence. It is about how a programme designed to weaponise individuals outlasts the paperwork that authorised it, the people who ran it, and the geopolitical moment that produced it. Treadstone, the programme, is older than Jason Bourne. Cicada, its follow-on, is older than Treadstone. Assets get left in place for decades. Someone in a government office somewhere decides it is time, and a man in North Dakota picks up a rifle he does not remember learning to use.
The show has a couple of core preoccupations.
It is more thoughtful than its USA Network slot suggests. It is also less coherent than it needed to be to survive.
Visually, Treadstone is the most expensive-looking thing USA Network had put out in years. Globe-trotting locations. Period flashbacks that actually look like their periods. North Korea 1973 has the right grain. Paris circa now has the right steel. The action choreography borrows from the Bourne films without quite cracking the geography and rhythm that made Paul Greengrass's set pieces so exhausting in the best way. When the fights work, they work. When they do not, you can feel the budget straining.
The sound design is careful. Silences are used, not filled. The show resists the urge to over-score its big moments, which is rare for network IP.
It is a polished production. What it lacks is the Bourne films' ruthless forward momentum. Six plotlines across two eras is a lot of plates to keep spinning, and the show sometimes forgets which one it is on.
Critics were split. Some praised the Bentley thread specifically and the McKenna thread for its slow-burn character work. Others called the structure a mess and the Bourne-without-Bourne conceit too thin to support a series. Audiences were not numerous enough to save it.
USA Network cancelled the show in May 2020, nearly five months after the finale aired, and the plotlines were left unresolved. No wrap-up movie. No second-season pickup at another network. No streamer rescue. The Cicada thread was still being set up. Bentley's arc was mid-flight. McKenna's family situation was unresolved. Petra's Paris chase was still open.
It is the kind of cancellation that is more common than people realise, and it is also the kind that kills a show's afterlife. Unresolved storylines do not get rewatched.
If you are a Bourne completist, you watch this. The Bentley strand alone is probably worth the entry fee. If you like the sleeper-asset-activating-in-suburbia premise, the McKenna thread is the closest thing modern television has to a prestige version of that story, and Brian J. Smith plays it straight enough to make you forgive the contrivance.
If you need your shows to end properly, give it a miss.
Fans of Alias will recognise the activated-sleeper bloodline, though Treadstone is colder and less operatic. Viewers who liked the procedural-CIA structure of Jack Ryan or Homeland will find a tonally familiar register here. If you want the leaner, single-asset thriller energy Bourne built its name on, The Terminal List and Reacher deliver it more reliably. And if you want the deep-cover ensemble treatment done right, The Americans is the gold standard. Treadstone reaches for that shelf. It does not quite get there.
Watch it knowing what it is. An ambitious, uneven, prematurely cancelled footnote in the Bourne television experiment. A promising first season that ran out of runway.
Patrick Fugit
Matt Edwards
Michelle Forbes
Ellen Becker