When I was thirteen, I was obsessed with Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I didn’t just love the show, I wanted to be Buffy. I wanted to look like her, fight like her, dress like her. The third of those was the most achievable, so I’d go to the mall and look for pleather jackets and stylish boots that you could fight your demons in. I suppose appealing to someone like my thirteen-year-old self is behind the creation of the new Citadel store on Amazon Prime. Not only can I watch Priyanka Chopra Jonas swing her hips in a $2000 designer dress, I can purchase that very same dress without even pausing the episode. Product placement has leveled up.
To be fair to Amazon, they did spend something like $200 million on the creation of this show, so perhaps the decision to turn it into an extremely upsetting ad campaign stems from a slight worry they won’t make back their investment. Or perhaps not, as Amazon has announced the series is their second most-watched of all time as of this writing. There’s no accounting for taste, I guess. From a critic’s perspective, the series itself is horrendous and probably was from the start, although massive reshoots and the public exit of original showrunner Josh Applebaum over “creative differences” (was the difference that he wanted it to not suck?) surely didn’t help matters. Adding in this much tacky product placement is just an additional embarrassment. It’s also probably the direction many more shows will take in the future. Amazon being an ecommerce site as well as a streamer gives it a leg-up in this area; it seems a natural fit to be able to admire Chopra Jonas’ signature red lipstick and then click “add to cart;” there’s no friction there. Other streamers will need to build a good deal of infrastructure to compete, but I have no doubt there are meetings being held as I type over how exactly to do that. I know product placement isn’t a new concept, but it has always been outrageously tacky and in the case of Citadel, it serves to further alienate the viewer from an already alienating show. Can’t I just watch a nonsensical spy thriller without being sold combat boots, shampoo, and $9 faux gold body chains?
Citadel is, as I’ve mentioned, a spy thriller. It is descended directly from the Pierce Brosnan tradition of Bond movies; there is a scene in episode three that so closely resembles a scene in The World is Not Enough that I imagine they are calling it an homage but it feels almost like copyright infringement. It is about a non-governmental unaligned spy organization called Citadel that secretly fights for everything that is good and green and just in the world, and the evil very bad naughty organization Manticore that wants to blow up the whole world and give everyone Ebola and crash the power grid and break up Ross and Rachel and shoot Mickey Mouse in the head. In the first episode the perfect, hot, MMA champion Citadel agents Nadia Sinh (Priyanka Chopra Jonas) and Mason Kane (Richard Madden) discover that someone has betrayed Citadel from within and thus all the agents are dying horribly and they have to escape the clutches of villains who are so comically evil they might as well be stroking fluffy white cats or drowning naked women in tubs of gold paint. Mason and Nadia do escape, but their Citadel handler/genius tech guy Bernard Orlick (Stanley Tucci) wipes their memories for some reason and they spend the next eight years just not being Citadel agents. We pick up with them in the present timeline when Mason (who is living as a Kyle, which emphatically he is not) enters his DNA into a database hoping to find some trace of his former life. This triggers a thingy and suddenly Bernard and everyone else know Mason Kane is alive. Oopsie!
There’s a lot more going on; Bernard is captured and tortured by Manticore superagent Lesley Manville, who is not being paid enough to deliver some of the lines she’s been written. Manville actually seems to be backtracking somewhat on her involvement in the series; The Guardian has her quoted at length on how much she hates the violence in the show. Unfortunately for both her and us, there’s not much else to it. The reshoots that ballooned the budget and delayed the release have left us a show that is somehow too short. The episodes are barely 40 minutes long and seem to zip by as we pop from location to location. Motivations shift with lightening speed and by the end of episode three, which is the halfway point in the series, I somehow felt like I’d only watched ten minutes of a show. I know more about which brand of skincare Nadia supposedly uses (RoC Multi Correxion Revive + Glow 10% Active Vitamin C Serum for Face, Daily Anti-Aging Wrinkle and Skin Tone Skin Care Treatment, Brightening Serum for Dark Spots), but couldn’t tell you a single detail about her character. This is, to put it mildly, a problem.
Shows and creators that are too big to fail are beginning to plague us more and more. The built-in value behind big brands like Marvel, Game of Thrones, Avatar, and Harry Potter ensure that new versions of that IP will be with us long after we’ve begged for it to stop. The Russo Brothers who, along with creating this show, also created The Grey Man for Netflix (their most expensive movie ever and narratively the equivalent of burnt toast) are being consistently rewarded for the extremely mid and wildly expensive content they produce. Citadel has already been renewed for a second season and spinoff series in India and Italy have already been greenlit. The Grey Man is getting a sequel and a spinoff too. The Russo Brothers, at least for now, have made themselves and their properties too big to fail, even when every critical outlet from The Guardian to Time to Variety to me is saying… uh what is this (the NYT called the storytelling “brisk” and Tucci praised the Russos for always getting him out of shooting by six, which I suppose are both true things one could say about this series)?
There are two things that make Bond movies work, in my opinion. One is they’re very self-aware. The other is that they come from a place of real darkness. Fleming was a spy; he knew exactly what his characters should encounter and how humor, new toys, a drinking habit, and a devil-may-care attitude could insulate you from the horror of what you were doing and the consequences should you fail. Even in the silliest of Bonds, there are stakes and there are pieces of home to cling to: Q and his gadgets, M and his insufferable British serenity, Moneypenny’s role as both mother and wife. Citadel tries to incorporate these elements but gives them no time to simmer. We’re lucky if we get ten seconds to spend with a character who isn’t punching someone else or conducting a car chase or skiing down a mountain chased by people with high-powered weapons. This kind of narrative is neither enjoyable nor lasting. I have spent over a thousand words talking about this show but I know I will forget nine tenths of the plot within the week. But at least I’ll have Nadia’s $14.99 crimson pleather box clutch to remember her by.