by Mike Hilty, Contributing Writer
I’ve been a fan of the Russo brothers since their days on the show Community. They’ve made some of the MCU’s most memorable movies, and are some of the most sought-after directors in Hollywood now. Post-MCU, they’ve made their way to streaming services, and have continued to make a wide range of shows and films. I’ve enjoyed their evolution as filmmakers, and they had one of my most anticipated shows of 2023: Citadel.
The series is about a group of spies, belonging to no country and fighting for what they perceive is the greater good, who are betrayed, causing the agency — Citadel — to fall. Two of the top agents, Mason Kane (Richard Madden) and Nadia Sinh (Priyanka Chopra Jonas), race to figure out who betrayed Citadel, and what they can do to stop a rival agency called Manticore from enacting their plans.
In a saturated market of spy TV with great shows like Slow Horses and Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan, Citadel struggles to stand apart from other shows. The ideas it presents for the agents are generally fine. They are well-trained, but can have their memories wiped at any moment to protect the agency. The organization as a whole also is a great concept: a no-nation organization that is looking out for the world, instead of one country’s safety and glory.
The main mission is to discover what happened to Citadel, and to figure out what Manticore’s plan is. Somehow, Citadel manages to make the mission too convoluted and boring at the same time. It’s too convoluted because the show treats spy protocols like James Bond would treat gadgets. There’s always something that can help or harm someone due to Citadel’s rules and protocols, like mind-erasing.
It’s a grave mistake that Citadel is a boring spy show. I concede that for the most part, spy shows are jam-packed with action, even though staples of the genre include pretending to be someone you’re not and sneaking around. Citadel’s main problem is that there are a lot of platitudes about why each organization is evil with unreliable characters. Also, the dialogue is filled with oddly-placed metaphors that make the conversations feel uneven, and not how people talk in the real world.
Part of the dialogue issue also comes from the performers. I enjoyed Chopra Jonas’s performance just fine. Madden is a bit of an issue because he has some wooden delivery. Bernard Orlick (Stanley Tucci) serves as a guide through this world, expositing the backstory to most of its other characters to help give the audience context about what’s going on. Tucci probably gives the strongest performance, but that’s also not saying a whole lot thanks to the rest of the cast.
Another issue that Citadel has is that every character has multiple layers to peel through; this makes it hard to root for them to succeed, and to get to know them. I understand that spies need to be chameleons and adapt to their environments, but those are for missions. The Citadel spies have too many things going on at once in their personal and professional lives, and they try to serve up too many twists to make the characters interesting. By the end of the season, I didn’t care about the outcome, because it feels like they came up with ways to create stakes that feel forced for the sake of some type of story turn that makes little sense.
Perhaps the thing I’m frustrated about the most comes during a post-credit scene in an episode. I knock TV shows for thinking too far ahead, because the current story suffers. Citadel is guilty of this, and if what they’re planning comes to fruition, I’m not giving the show a pass for making a tedious freshmen season. In the current landscape of streaming television, a Season Two is not guaranteed, unless the series gets great viewership (however that’s measured).
Citadel commits a cardinal sin of an action TV series: It bored me to tears. It has good ideas, but the choices regarding characters, writing, and action scenes don’t work for me. I’m sure there’s an audience for this out there, but I’m not among of them, unfortunately. Despite the star power, this will be a one-and-done for me.
Score: 5/10
Citadel is currently streaming on Amazon Prime Video
You can read more from Mike Hilty, and follow him on Twitter, Letterboxd, and Serializd