Over a century ago, Citadel was established as the world’s first multinational spy agency. Beholden to no country their job was to keep the peace. Eight years ago, they were wiped out. Today, Kyle Conroy (Richard Madden) is about to discover he’s a Citadel agent called Mason Kane who lost his memory eight years ago. He and his old partner Nadia Sinh (Priyanka Chopra Jonas) are two of the only survivors and, along with tech genius Bernard Orlick (Stanley Tucci) they’re all that stands between Citadel’s murderers and global domination.

This is a great cast, a fun premise and at almost no point does it work. Pacing first: a solid half of the first episode is a flashback establishing the events of the fall of Citadel. We meet Mason and Nadia, see them discover Citadel is falling and see the moderately impressive action scene that ensues. The stunt team on this show are carrying it on their backs right now and both leads get some fun action beats. Still it’s a solid twenty minutes and then…

We flash forward to the present and spend the rest of the episode on Kyle who has no idea who he is while we very much do. This isn’t the cast’s fault in any way, Madden does the heavy lifting in episode 1 and does what he can but it’s like the show functionally re-starts at the halfway mark of the first episode. There’s been some well documented production issues, including massive budget overruns, re-shoots galore and rumours that the initial episodes were an hour long. These are not. It shows.

Problems extend deep into the scripts too. Everything presents like a first draft with some deeply ludicrous character and plot choices continually pulling you out of the show. The most egregious of these is the X Case, a briefcase containing the launch codes for every nuclear missile on Earth, numerous other secrets and the downloaded memories of Citadel agents. But apparently only about a dozen as it’s not that big a case.

So far so Fast and Furious but the quest to retrieve this case from Manticore, Citadel’s adversaries, unfolds across about five minutes and involves Mason walking into a Manticore lab looking and sounding like his old self (the one Manticore tried to kill) while Bernard (also undisguised) literally waits outside in the car.

The one he’s borrowed from his ex-wife.

Despite owning a high-tech spy truck we saw earlier.

Oh and when they steal this briefcase that people have and continue to kill for, their high end escape is to just…t rundle the motorway chatting until Manticore’s twin brother assassins (Roland Møller, doing what he can) chase them down.

This is just one plot point. There’s a cool half dozen like it which make just as little sense. Worse, no one’s actually a character. Everyone says things aloud a lot but with the possible exception of Bernard, you don’t like any of them. Madden is especially badly served with Mason being a cookie cutter piece of chestmeat action bro so outdated you suspect he thinks ‘woke’ is an insult and has doubts about centuries of confirmed vaccination science. He’s an asshole, smug, incompetent, sexist, like a 40-something’s stick figure drawing of James Bond. He’s also being set up, I suspect, for a Total Recall style twist as the person who sold Citadel out but I’m not even sure that can, or should save him.

Jonas at least gets to cut loose a little bit and Nadia being the door-kicker of the two as well as the brains is a nice touch but even this is overplayed. She gets three high end fight scenes in the first 90 minutes of the show, all of which outstay their welcome and the last of which revolves around the farcical memory solution and how it apparently takes effect instantly with no physiological consequences at all. Only Tucci’s Bernard is actually fun, because he’s Stanley Tucci doing spy things and that’s always going to be a good time.

Even then the show isn’t done letting you down. This thing cost more than Avatar 2 and none of that seems to have made it to the screen. The opening train fight/crash is fun but everything else feels flat and, bluntly, cheap so far. That wouldn’t be a bad thing if the show actually had been made for less than the GDP of a small country but given what’s gone on, it’s another failure to add to the list.

Verdict: Citadel is a mess, from start to finish. It wastes a great cast and a fun premise on a show which looks and moves like what it apparently is: the unlovable compromise between warring producers. The idea is apparently for the show to become an umbrella franchise with different Citadel agents in different countries and I love that and want to see it succeed. But based on this first season, the odds are stacked against the series worse than they are against its characters. A real shame and a terrible start that the show may very well not be able to overcome. 2/10

Alasdair Stuart