Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Rabbit Hole’ On Paramount+, Where Kiefer Sutherland Is A Corporate Espionage Expert Framed For Multiple Murders

There’s a reason why viewers like seeing Kiefer Sutherland, even as he is well into his 50s, run around in an action series while his character constantly wriggles out of trouble: He’s good at it. He gives his action characters the right balance of wry self-deprecation but also makes the fact that his characters seem to have supernatural powers of scape believable. A new action series on Paramount+ brings Sutherland back to the genre in a way viewers haven’t seen since the last iteration of 24 that he starred in ended.

RABBIT HOLE: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: A closeup of a hand, its thumb furiously tapping on the wood it’s resting on. Then, when a window shifts open, the hand is made into a fist.

The Gist: John Weir (Kiefer Sutherland) is in a church confessional, but not to admit to sins. He’s completely paranoid and hasn’t slept in days. He just wants someone to listen to him.

Three weeks earlier, he’s at the bar in a swanky restaurant. He’s pissing off a hedge fund douche by watching a soccer game on TV when the guy wants to see some financial news. Also, the Fed chairman happens to be there. He meets a woman named Hailey (Meta Golding), who is doing business in New York for a non-profit; they hit it off and sleep together. The next morning, John finds the camera in the hotel room clock and tells the woman that whoever is trying to blackmail him should do something other than videos of him sleeping with beautiful women.

As he’s going to his office, Weir is approached by FBI special agent Jo Madi (Enid Graham), who knows Weir’s operation well. She wants to know why there was a big stock sell-off that one of his clients took advantage of the night before. Weir, you see, is the head of a small corporate espionage firm, who runs cons like at the restaurant the night before in order to help their clients.

An old friend, Milo Valence (Jason Butler Harner), hires Weir’s company for a job that’s a bit beyond the purview of his massive data-mining corporation. He needs some good old hands-on espionage, which he and Weir used to do back in the day. The idea is that he wants to show Edward Homm (Rob Yang), a Treasury department investigator handing information to a CEO of a company that competes with Valence’s client. The idea is that, to make the investigation go away, there has to be a perception that the Treasury department investigator is in cahoots with the competitor, even though that’s not true.

Weir sets up an elaborate scenario that puts the two of them in the same place long enough for photos to be taken, seemingly satisfying Valence. As he exits the building, Weir sees Hailey getting into a car and wonders why she’s there when her non-profit’s office is elsewhere in the city.

He goes to confront her near her office in Times Square, but she sees on one of the massive screens that he’s now wanted in the death of Agent Homm. From there, Weir gets chased by a police horse and takes a wild cab ride back to his office, just in time to see an explosion go off on the floor where his office is. Then he goes to Valance, thinking he was set up, and Valance does something that completely throws Weir for a loop.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Rabbit Hole evokes pieces of Sutherland’s previous series, from 24 to Designated Survivor. It’s action but in a different package.

Our Take: While watching the first episode of Rabbit Hole, created by Glenn Ficarra and John Requa (This Is Us, WeCrashed), we were trying to figure out if we’re supposed to be making sense of all of the twists and turns occurring in John Weir’s life, or if we’re just supposed to go along for the ride. The viewing experience is a lot better if it’s the latter because, boy, some of what we saw in the first episode were definitely head scratchers.

We get that Weir is paranoid; it’s the nature of his job. So chalking up his responses to Agent Madi, as well as his bad feeling about Hailey, to the paranoia helps throw viewers off the trail of what’s going on.

But as we get through the first episode, it seemed that Rabbit Hole was going to be about a guy who sets up heist-style scenarios with his team of good-looking operatives, where Sutherland can quip his way through the scenarios and then see them through. It would be like the original series version of Mission: Impossible except with the purpose of digging up corporate secrets. It was intriguing but seemed like it could get repetitive.

Then he’s framed for Homm’s murder, which takes place completely offscreen, something you never see on TV shows like this. Then it becomes a matter of Weir’s paranoia working against him as he gets to the bottom of who framed him. He becomes especially frantic after he sees his office explode — supposedly with his entire crew inside — and what happens to Valence. So the series then becomes how he uses these espionage skills to clear his name. It’s well established that he’s so paranoid that he takes cabs and uses burner phones, and can live just enough off the grid to hide in plain sight.

But (and this is a big but): The final scene of the first episode gives us pause. It shows that Weir might be in on the frame-up, or at least a portion of it. Is he really being set up as a murderer or is there a longer, bigger con going on? A perusal of the cast list shows us that we haven’t seen the last of Valence, Homm or Hailey.

So what, exactly, are we going to witness here? Lots of chases and scenes of Sutherland running? Is he going to confide in Agent Madi? And how is Hailey involved in all of this?

We just wonder if we’re just going to get thrown lots of red herrings and little in the way of story or character or if this all will make some modicum of sense by the end of the first season. We’re not sure by the end of the first episode which will happen, which is something we’re not used to.

Sex and Skin: None in the first episode. The only evidence we see of Weir and Hailey’s night together is her waking up the next morning, and he’s already dressed.

Parting Shot: Back at the house where Weir grew up, he’s holding someone captive, someone no one would expect to see.

Sleeper Star: We’ll give this to Enid Graham as Agent Madi, who fires off a couple of funny lines while matching Weir quip for quip. Also, Walt Klink plays Kyle the intern, who may or may not be the only person who survived the explosion at Weir’s office.

Most Pilot-y Line: As Weir talks to his ex-wife about their son, he asks, “Does he really hate it here?” and she replies, “He’s 14 years old; he hates everything.”

Our Call: STREAM IT. We think viewers need to give Rabbit Hole a few episodes before determining whether it’s going to drive them nuts, entertain them, or both. But if you just want to see Sutherland run around and get in and out of trouble like Jack Bauer used to, then this show should satisfy that desire.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.