Amazon brought its upcoming series Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan to New York Comic Con on Saturday. The show doesn’t premiere until summer 2018 or thereabouts -- showrunner Carlton Cuse seemed reluctant to pin down an exact time window during the NYCC panel – but fans were treated to a sneak peek at the first seven minutes of the pilot, an intense teaser trailer and a Q&A with Cuse, Executive Producer Graham Roland, and stars John Krasinsky and Abbie Cornish.
The footage began with a scene set in 1983 Lebanon. Two young brothers are dancing to Safety Dance until their mom breaks up the party and sends them off to tend to their chores. Their adorable hijinks are interrupted when a group of jets screams through the sky before turning to begin a massive bombing run that envelopes the boys’ entire village.
Cut to the present day, Jack Ryan (Krasinsky), wearing a Boston College t-shirt, is rowing a boat. He finishes his workout and hops on his bike to pedal to work. Maybe I’m reading in too much but this version of Ryan seems like a risk-taker – he doesn’t wear a helmet and he has earbuds in while cycling through traffic. His lack of safety precautions almost costs him dearly when he’s nearly hit by a car driven by Wendell Pierce’s character, James Greer.
Greer, we learn, has just returned to the CIA where Jack works as a junior analyst. It seems something went wrong on Greer’s last assignment or in his personal life -- his wife is divorcing him – or both, resulting in a forced leave of absence. Now that he’s back his boss (Timothy Hutton) appoints him as the group chief of a team covering, as Greer calls it, a “backwater post.” The footage ended with Greer introducing himself to his new team, which includes Ryan as a member.
Cuse quickly explained that this reboot of the franchise was a modern reimagining of the Jack Ryan character and would not be based on anything written by Tom Clancy. Only Jack, Greer and Cathy Muller (Cornish) have been taken from the books. Everything else is original, though Roland described the pains taken to ensure authenticity and keep the feel of Clancy's books.
“Authenticity is one of if not the biggest hallmarks of Tom Clancy,” he said. “He really made you feel like you were brought into that world in an accurate way because he researched a lot. Carlton and I felt like we had to carry on that tradition. We had some great consultants.” Cuse added, “And Graham was a Marine, which also I think is very important.”
Cuse continued, “[Clancy] really managed to put his finger on geopolitical issues of the time and of the moment. When Graham and I started, we started adapting one of the books and we realized it just felt dated so we abandoned that and came up with our own original story, which we really felt was of this time and of this moment. It involves terrorism but it really goes deep.”
In the books, Cathy Muller is married to Ryan. In the first episode Muller, now depicted as a doctor specializing infectious diseases, meets him for the first time.
“We meet her because Jack is at a party that her father is hosting,” Cornish said. “So they meet accidentally, in a way. Well, he instigates it. Sparks were flying! What ensues after that is basically them dating. She also is a doctor of infectious diseases and later on in the series this comes in handy with the CIA because they’re dealing with an infectious disease that is a threat.”
The story is set to follow Ryan, currently in his fourth year at the CIA, as he progresses from up-and-coming desk job analyst to, as Krasinski put it, “a superspy.” Said Cuse, “We wanted to start the story in a little bit of a different place than the books and the previous movies. So in our version James Greer is just Jack’s immediate boss. In the movies and in the books he’s way above him in the CIA.” As for Jack, “This is an early version of Jack Ryan. He’s only been in the CIA for four years. He’s a really successful analyst and in the course of our story we see he gets his first experience in the field and we get to see how that works out for him.”
The show’s villain, Suleiman, is going to be shown in some detail. Roland said the goal was “to have a villain that we could understand even if we don’t agree with.” Though no one in the panel made this connection, it’s not hard to imagine one of the boys from the sequence in Lebanon surviving and growing up to be Suleiman.
The panel talked at length about how the eight-episode season will allow them the freedom to tell a much deeper story than a two-hour movie would, and Krasinsky indicated it would be darker and grittier in tone. The production values are also a good bit higher than many TV shows, with location shoots in Morocco, Paris, Montreal and Washington D.C. The cast discussed a scene in an early episode where Ryan is picked up by a real U.S. Coast Guard helicopter, and there was some mention of another helicopter scene in the season finale that would be much more intense. Though it’s total speculation, this could refer to a version of the helicopter crash from the books, in which Ryan was severely injured.
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