Maureen Ryan

If these references sound as if they belonged to an arcane code, that’s appropriate, given that they spring from the obscure AMC spy drama “Rubicon,” which ran for one season in 2010. Despite the deluge of TV we’ve endured in the past decade, certain moments, images and, yes, names from this long-dead drama remain fresh in my memory. TV loves spy serials, which can provide ambiguity and explosions in equal measure. But few espionage sagas had a cast of characters as specific and as brilliantly portrayed as the rogue’s gallery of “Rubicon.”

The good news is that the ranks of Spangler acolytes may grow now that the network’s paid subscription service, AMC Premiere, has added all 13 episodes of “Rubicon.” A rewatch affirms that it holds up — and that, in many ways, it was ahead of its time.

Some of the appeal, for television critics anyway, might be the premise of “Rubicon.” The show follows a set of analysts and managers at the fictional API, a private company that synthesizes data provided by various American spy agencies. Anyone who writes about TV for a living is bound to be attracted to this tale of rumpled, well-intentioned people trying to make sense of narratives with inexplicable gaps and challenging inconsistencies.

But there’s much more to “Rubicon” than its nerdy appeal. Now that conspiracy theories have moved from the fringes to the center of political life, the questions “Rubicon” asks about the manipulation of truth and the ways the powerful intentionally obscure their most craven agendas are more compelling than ever. “Rubicon” anticipated Elliot Alderson (Rami Malek), the distrustful protagonist of “Mr. Robot,” by half a decade. (The “Rubicon” characters, however, are drowning in paper and don’t use their computers much, which may well have been a prescient precaution).

It would be wrong for a piece about a spy drama to reveal too many secrets, but there’s much that can be discussed without ruining a “Rubicon” binge. Its star, James Badge Dale — who also appeared on “24,” a flashier and more problematic secret-agent tale — brings a well-calibrated mixture of determination and doubt to the role of Will Travers, an analyst who is promoted to API management. Travers is shy and relatively awkward, but he’s not a pushover, and much of the season revolves around his attempts to figure out if his bosses — and the bigwigs they answer to — are using the intellectual output of API employees in shady ways.

A fair bit of “Rubicon” can be enjoyed as a delicious workplace drama. Travers’ immediate boss, Kale Ingram (Arliss Howard), is a cool cucumber who boasts of a resting pulse of 46 beats per minute. Howard makes Ingram’s calculated reticence fascinating: We’re led to believe that the motives of this intelligence veteran are honorable, but that’s by no means a sure thing, certainly not as far as Travers is concerned.

The eccentric but ruthless Spangler (Michael Cristofer), API’s top executive, is even harder to figure out. Often found munching on a bowl of cereal, Spangler tries to manipulate both his staff and the government types who pay API’s bills in ways that are every bit as addictive as anything that ever transpired on “Mad Men.” As a private business, API has to hustle for contracts, and thus Spangler is only too happy to keep representatives of the military-industrial complex happy. But over time, it begins to look as if he were playing a much deeper game. (My personal conspiracy theory: Cristofer’s string-pulling “Mr. Robot” character, Phillip Price, is Spangler gone undercover. Wake up, sheeple!)

Unlike “24” or “Homeland,” whose relentless pursuit of “big twists” ultimately led to seasons of diminishing returns, “Rubicon” offers storytelling that is methodical and measured. It does an outstanding job of conveying the personal and psychological costs of working in the American intelligence trenches during the war on terror. Dallas Roberts, who later appeared on “The Good Wife,” is particularly wonderful as Miles Fiedler, a twitchy genius with haunted eyes.

The show’s greatest virtue may be that, unlike too many serious dramas of the last decade, it’s never a slog. It perks along at a steady pace, though there are a couple of subplots, including one featuring Miranda Richardson as the widow of a secretive rich man, that never quite come together. Still, the specificity of the characters and the able deployment of spy-show tropes — conversations in garages, tantalizing codes and scenes of characters tacking handwritten clues on walls — make it enjoyable to follow the characters as they fall down various rabbit holes.

“Rubicon” — like secret-agent shows as diverse as “Strike Back,” “London Spy,” “The Americans,” “Berlin Station” and “The Night Manager” — keeps a laser focus on the human beings at its core, people who are smart enough to know they’re not omniscient and who are queasy about the sometimes hasty life-or-death assessments they must provide. A sense of bittersweet loss pervades the show, and not just because Travers’ wife and child were killed on Sept. 11. Once inside the fold of API, these people can’t share their professional challenges with anyone else; they have only one another to commiserate with.

Complicated friendships and tasteful ambiguity, however, don’t always pay the bills. Ratings (remember them?) mattered more when “Rubicon” debuted, and it didn’t attract a big audience. Unlike “Homeland,” which came along a year later, it had no big-name stars. “Rubicon” also endured a showrunner change, when its creator, Jason Horwitch, left, and Henry Bromell (“Northern Exposure,” “Homicide”) took over.

As much as I might want the API gang to return, that’s unlikely. Bromell, who moved on to “Homeland” and wrote its best episode (“Q&amp;A;”) before dying in 2013, is not around to lead a revival. Speaking of loss, cast member Christopher Evan Welch, who infused his prickly character, Grant Test, with intelligent sweetness and humane depth (and who was also brilliant in a key “Silicon Valley” role), died far too young the same year.

Perhaps it’s appropriate that the sole season of “Rubicon” will stand alone. Though if Truxton Spangler somehow engineered API’s return to the small screen, I wouldn’t be surprised.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/22/arts/television/rubicon-amc-stream.html" id="2921f64f-b524-38fd-a491-8784f3205460">The New York Times</a>.

Say the name “Truxton Spangler,” and a certain sort of TV fan’s eyes will light up. Fair warning: Once Spangler’s name has been dropped, mentions of Kale Ingram, four-leaf clovers and breakfast cereal are likely to follow.

Ahead of Its Time, 'Rubicon' Still Holds Up

Nature was certainly one of her passions: The 19th-century Englishwoman dressed in stylish black clothes that resembled menswear and spent hours walking through the countryside, visiting friends and supervising workers at Shibden Hall, the Halifax, West Yorkshire, estate she inherited. Her forceful personality was also evident in the business world; some of her acres were rich in coal, and she relished scrapping with the coal titans of the 1830s as she tried to improve the estate’s fortunes.

But her boldness was most evident in matters of love. Many of the 5 million-plus words in Lister’s voluminous diaries, some of which were in code, chronicled her relationships with a string of women she wooed, loved and bedded.

Lister’s complicated courtship with the wealthy Ann Walker sits at the heart of “Gentleman Jack,” a historical drama series premiering Monday on HBO (in a coproduction with the BBC) that was shot on location at Shibden Hall. As a child, the show’s creator and writer, Sally Wainwright, visited the historical site with her family — the house and its grounds are now a public park — but she didn’t have a full picture of Lister’s life for years. “People didn’t like talking about her,” Wainwright said.

She became more deeply acquainted with Lister after coming across “Female Fortune,” a 1998 book on Lister by Jill Liddington, and has spent many hours reading and decoding pages of Lister’s daily musings. “It’s not typed script, it’s handwriting,” Wainwright said. “So few eyes may have actually been across any particular piece of writing. To know that you might be the first person who’s read [a section] — it’s very intimate.”

Wainwright funded the restoration and digitization of the diary and said the West Yorkshire Archive Service is working on a site that should make it accessible to the public later this spring. The BAFTA winner, best known to U.S. viewers for the Netflix cop drama “Happy Valley,” has also penned the foreword to “Gentleman Jack: The Real Anne Lister” by Anne Choma, a biographical portrait with extensive diary excerpts that will be released April 30.

In a phone interview last month, Wainwright — who also directed half of the eight episodes of “Gentleman Jack” — discussed “Happy Valley,” Lister’s ambitions and finding the perfect actress to play the “buccaneering” diarist. These are edited excerpts from that conversation.

Q: You’ve done a number of projects — “Happy Valley” in particular — focused on crime or police officers. Was “Gentleman Jack” an intentional break from that?

A: You can easily get pigeonholed as somebody who writes police dramas, and as much as I love the police dramas I’ve done, I wouldn’t want to get pigeonholed as specifically doing that. I’m quite lucky in all the dramas I’ve done, they’ve been quite different, from “Last Tango in Halifax” and “Happy Valley” and “To Walk Invisible,” my film about the Brontë sisters.

Q: It strikes me that Catherine Cawood from “Happy Valley” and Anne Lister were both Yorkshire women who cared about their communities.

A: With Anne Lister it was slightly different, in that it was her estate and she had about 25 tenants. So it was her world, and she did refer to them as “my people,” and she was very good to them. She could be hard on people — if they weren’t pulling their weight she wouldn’t think twice about evicting them. But there were people that did work hard, and she looked after them. She often [paid for] people’s kids to be educated. That’s different from Catherine, who had a beat overseeing a massive landscape and was paid to do it. But she did care at quite a deep level. It’s an interesting thought, that parallel.

Q: One thing that sets “Gentleman Jack” apart from your earlier work is that, as Anne, actress Suranne Jones occasionally looks into the camera and addresses the viewer. Is that your way of re-creating the intimacy of the diary?

A: Absolutely. I thought long and hard about [whether] we wanted her to address the camera, because it’s something that a lot of people do now, with varying degrees of success. So I was quite nervous about whether to do it or not, and indeed, how to do it. We did it very sparingly, and we only did it when we felt absolutely justified. But the thinking behind it was definitely that [feeling] of intimacy with her audience. When you’re reading her most intimate thoughts in the journal, it does feel like you’ve got a direct line to her.

Q: Why do you think she kept the diary?

A: She didn’t want to forget things, particularly in business. If she’d done a deal with someone, she would make a record of everything down to the last halfpenny. But I also think she was a compulsive writer. She took great pleasure in actually putting it down in black and white and in recording her relationships with other women, because then she could relive them.

Q: She’s often direct and no-nonsense in daily life, but at certain moments, she can be quite vulnerable and romantic.

A: She’s a mass of contradictions. She was very tough, but she also wore her heart on her sleeve in the journal. You get a picture of a sensitive human being, someone who’s vulnerable to the vagaries of love and passion but who is able to take on the world and who would not shy away from being quite conspicuous about who she was. And yet it’s clear that she did feel things deeply when people offended her.

Q: She’s also willing to get down into the dirt with her workers, but at the same time, she believed in the class system.

A: Absolutely. If she was a man, none of these contradictions would be contradictions. She identified herself, really, with men, and with a sort of masculine persona. So the idea of pursuing Ann Walker [Sophie Rundle] for her money — that’s what landed men did then. They tried to improve their lot by marrying well. At the same time, I don’t think she wanted to be a man. I think she liked being a lesbian. I think she liked being a woman, because it allowed her to be in intimate situations with women in a way that a man in those days wouldn’t be allowed.

Q: She reminds me of those 18th-century Hogarth paintings — “A Rake’s Progress.” She’s a Regency rake and flirt at times, isn’t she?

A: That’s really true. Some of the press already is describing her as Victorian, but she wasn’t. She died three years after Victoria ascended the throne, so she’s very Regency. She was a real player. She was very good at sex. It was high on her agenda of what was important, and she was good at it.

Q: Did you have an idea of who you wanted to play Anne for a long time?

A: I didn’t, to be honest. I couldn’t picture who could be Anne Lister. There aren’t that many portraits of her, and all that exist are a little bit cartoony. So I’ve never had a strong image of what she was like, and I needed someone to come and show me what she was like, and Suranne did that. Right from the word go, she really got it. Like Anne, she’s got a huge physical energy, she’s got this mental energy, and she’s bold and robust in her thinking. She will push things to the limit and be willing to go into quite deep, dark places. But she also got how Anne was very swashbuckling and buccaneering and magnificent, really.

Q: You can see why people are drawn to her. Every time Anne comes into a room, she’s so commanding.

A: She was very charismatic in real life. It’s clear from the journal that people liked being with her and that she always had plenty to say. Women probably did like her hugely because she gave them a sense of their own worth somehow — that women could be like this. They didn’t have to be these little bits of decoration. At the time, it was considered unladylike to be clever or to show you were too clever. So I think women must have found her extremely stimulating.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/18/arts/television/gentleman-jack-sally-wainwright.html" id="8fad556b-93e8-318e-aa0e-1c7650cae238">The New York Times</a>.

Referring to Anne Lister as a force of nature is accurate, but it’s also just a starting point.

In 'Gentleman Jack,' Sally Wainwright Brings a Fascinating Life From Diary to Screen

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Maureen Ryan

Articles written by the author

Ahead of Its Time, 'Rubicon' Still Holds Up

In 'Gentleman Jack,' Sally Wainwright Brings a Fascinating Life From Diary to Screen