--- title: Hijack, Citadel, Diplomat: How TV Thrillers Lost the Plot description: Shows set within the crucible of politics suddenly seem allergic to political ideas of all kinds. canonical: https://time.com/6292855/diplomat-citadel-hijack-thrillers/ author: Judy Berman article:opinion: false article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2023-07-12T12:00:18.000Z article:modified_time: 2026-05-11T04:53:09.345Z article:section: Entertainment og:title: How TV's Political Thrillers Lost the Plot og:description: From 'Citadel' to 'Hijack,' shows set within the crucible of politics suddenly seem allergic to political ideas. og:url: https://time.com/6292855/diplomat-citadel-hijack-thrillers/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt9da1ecda7d2ba9ea/698a3e730116826ad8983379/time_repetitive-tv-shows_final_color_b.jpg?branch=production&width=3840&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 og:image:width: 1200 og:image:height: 675 og:image:alt: TV Political Thrillers og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: How TV's Political Thrillers Lost the Plot twitter:description: From 'Citadel' to 'Hijack,' shows set within the crucible of politics suddenly seem allergic to political ideas. twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt9da1ecda7d2ba9ea/698a3e730116826ad8983379/time_repetitive-tv-shows_final_color_b.jpg?branch=production&width=3840&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 ---  # How TV's Political Thrillers Lost the Plot ## Video: Parasocial Relationships: How Admiring a Celeb Might Be Healthy [Watch (HLS stream): Parasocial Relationships: How Admiring a Celeb Might Be Healthy](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/YQnKt3Qu.m3u8) (5:52)  _Published 2023-07-13. There’s a good chance that you—yes, even you—have had a parasocial experience. Ever yell at the football player on your TV who just fumbled the ball, even though you knew he couldn’t hear you? That’s an example of a parasocial interaction, which can progress into a parasocial relationship—typically defined as a one-sided social and emotional connection developed with fictional characters or celebrities._  by [Judy Berman](https://time.com/author/judy-berman/)  ## Judy Berman TV Critic Jul 12, 2023 12:00 PM UTC  Illustration by Kaitlin Brito for TIME  by [Judy Berman](https://time.com/author/judy-berman/)  ## Judy Berman TV Critic Jul 12, 2023 12:00 PM UTC The latest Marvel TV series, [_Secret Invasion_](https://time.com/6289141/secret-invasion-captain-marvel-refresher/), opens with an uncharacteristically timely monologue. “Imagine a world where information can’t be trusted,” rasps a CIA agent in present-day Moscow. “Not very hard, is it? News service says one thing. Website says another. Society starts to fray. All we can turn to are the people we care about. But what if those people weren’t who we thought they were?” So far, so chillingly authentic to this era of information bubbles and conspiracy thinking. But then Agent Prescod (Richard Dormer) continues: “What if they weren’t even human?” It turns out he’s talking about Skrulls: reptilian space aliens who hide behind human faces on Earth. According to his theory, a series of international terrorist attacks, each claimed by a different group of militants, are really all part of the Skrulls’ plot to overthrow humanity. It’s a shrewd setup, familiar enough to resonate in the real, chaotic world of 2023 but vague enough to be universally palatable. Depending on your perspective, the Skrulls could be the lizard people of proto-[QAnon](https://time.com/6076590/qanon-conspiracy-why-people-believe/) conspiracy theories or Russian intelligence operatives undermining democracy.  Samuel L. Jackson as Nick Fury in Marvel Studios' SECRET INVASION Gareth Gatrell—MARVEL. This slippery approach to political subtext is nothing new for Disney-owned Marvel, which is constantly recalibrating its family-friendly superheroes for a time when extreme partisanism can render even the most anodyne entertainment controversial—and when Hollywood products must satisfy the conflicting mores of the many nations that import them. What’s notable about _Secret Invasion_, styled as a Cold War spy thriller but abstracted from the ideological conflicts of the [real Cold War](https://time.com/6209992/mikhail-gorbachev-end-cold-war/), is how common its particular form of evasiveness has become among TV’s most popular thrillers. Shows set within the crucible of politics suddenly seem allergic to political ideas of all kinds. --- ### More from TIME --- Often the result is thematic incoherence so conspicuous it makes suspension of disbelief impossible. Series as technically polished as Netflix’s hit [Keri Russell](https://time.com/5399402/keri-russell-emmys-2018-meme/) vehicle _The Diplomat_ and Amazon’s Russo brothers franchise [_Citadel_](https://time.com/6274967/citadel-review-amazon/) hang on eye-poppingly absurd premises. Yet behind these screens that streamers have left blank for members of enormous global audiences to project their own diverse values, a political perspective both cynical in its opaqueness and aspirational in its simplicity is taking shape.  Idris Elba in Hijack Apple TV+ **The Apple TV+** miniseries _Hijack_, a real-time thriller in the tradition of [_24_](https://time.com/83244/24-review-live-another-day/), unfolds on a seven-hour flight from Dubai to London. [Idris Elba](https://time.com/6253534/idris-elba-sabrina-dhowre-elba-impact-award/) stars as a passenger who happens to be a preternaturally calm corporate negotiator who has shepherded clients through high-stress mergers and takeovers. So he’s uniquely prepared to influence the hijackers toward his preferred outcome: getting home alive. First, he has to figure out who they are and what they want. The history of airplane hijacking is a history of political outrage taken to brutal extremes. Blockbuster thrillers from _Air Force One_ to _Die Hard 2_ have often mirrored this theme. _Hijack_—brace for a mild spoiler—is different. After a bit of misdirection involving a hijacker who speaks Arabic and is thus presumed by two oafish passengers to be a suicide bomber, it becomes clear that these attackers have no political agenda. The motivation behind their crime is so complex and unlikely as to verge on nonsensical. You can see why its creators would avoid political subtext. Post-9/11 thrillers like _24_ and [_Homeland_](https://time.com/3602361/homeland-season-4-review/) notoriously fed Islamophobia. The right’s peculiar sensitivities dictate that Putin’s Russia is no longer a universally acknowledged foe. Meanwhile, Apple TV+ is—like Netflix, Prime Video, et al.—available in more than 100 countries. There’s no way for a show designed for broad international appeal to parse the politics of real state violence and terrorism without alienating audiences crucial to its success.  From left: Kenichiro Thomson, Ato Essandoh, and Keri Russell in The Diplomat Alex Bailey—Netflix Recent thrillers set squarely in the realm of global politics have contorted their story lines in even sillier ways, presumably for similar reasons. _The Diplomat_ casts Russell as a career Foreign Service officer suddenly appointed as the American ambassador to the UK, just after a deadly attack on a British aircraft carrier. The show teases the usual suspects—Iran, Russia—before settling on a patently ridiculous culprit closer to home. The moral of the story? Diplomacy is good. It’s a takeaway so innocuous, you’d have to be a militant extremist or a war profiteer to disagree. Dopier still is _Citadel_, an expensive espionage thriller that, [despite an underwhelming rollout](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2023-07-05/amazon-ceo-asks-his-hollywood-studio-to-explain-its-big-spending), Amazon is spinning off into a multilingual franchise. The plot circles around the question of which of two ex-lover agents ([Priyanka Chopra](https://time.com/4300122/priyanka-chopra-time-100-video/) and [Richard Madden](https://time.com/collection/100-most-influential-people-2019/5567867/richard-madden/)) sabotaged the show’s eponymous top-secret organization. An international group described as being “loyal only to the safety and security of all people,” Citadel watched the watchers, preventing nuclear launches and Y2K crises. Before its annihilation by Manticore, an also-blandly-international crime syndicate, it was “the last line of defense for good in the world.” It’s possible to make a substantive thriller without explicitly addressing any real-world political situation. (See: TNT’s [_The Lazarus Project_](https://time.com/6291441/best-tv-shows-june-2023/)). What’s disconcerting about this new crop of shows is that their studied neutrality extends to abstract ideals like freedom and safety. Cold War thrillers tended to champion capitalist individualism over authoritarian communism. Post-[Watergate](https://time.com/6170831/gaslit-true-story-starz/) conspiracy thrillers from _The Parallax View_ to _Three Days of the Condor_ cautioned viewers to question authority at home. But their contemporary counterparts are so timid, they’ve reduced a supposedly grown-up genre to so many superhero stories, awash in truisms. The bad guys are bad because they’re criminals. The good guys are good because they’re the good guys.  Richard Madden and Priyanka Chopra Jonas in Citadel Prime Video—Amazon Studios **The irony is** that, as much as we might look to entertainment to escape from the world’s endless problems, no form of pop-culture storytelling can ever be truly apolitical. These thrillers’ rejection of not just current events but also the conflicting ideas and values that underlie them is, itself, political. It reveals the widening gulf that separates viewers, both at home and abroad. And it speaks to our collective exhaustion with politicized discourse. In tiptoeing around such extreme sensitivities, TV’s new thrillers end up inhabiting moral universes where characters, bereft of personal convictions about things like justice or the common good, can only make selfish decisions. Elba’s Sam, whose choice of career suggests a ruthless pursuit of self-interest, is upfront with the hijackers. He doesn’t want to be a hero; he just wants to get home to the people he loves. By the end of its first season, _Citadel_ devolves into a sort of high-octane family drama, propelled by passion, betrayal, and trauma—that all-purpose plot driver—rather than by any deeper understanding of what its clash of titans means for the world. It’s all pretty cynical, and accidentally reflective of a public sphere where any expression of belief or concern is likely to be dismissed as virtue signaling. Yet the flipside to the glibness of these shows is their sincere longing for simplicity amid the complexities of a world where so many tribes of adherents to mutually exclusive dogmas seem certain they’re right. As bland as _The Diplomat_’s defense of diplomacy is, it’s also soothing—16 months into [Russia’s war on Ukraine](https://time.com/tag/ukraine/), as refugees stream out of [Syria](https://time.com/finding-home/) and [South Sudan](https://time.com/tag/south-sudan/)—to imagine an elite corps of public servants competently nip ping international incidents in the bud. What is Citadel but an imaginary representation of the same fantasy? There is nothing more quintessentially human than the wish for perfect knowledge of right and wrong. It’s the foundation of religion and philosophy. The _deus ex machina_ has been a narrative device since Ancient Greece. Now, we call those characters superheroes, and they don’t wait ‘til the end of the story to show up with a moral judgment. But superhero tales are simplistic for a reason: they were conceived for children. In a more sophisticated world, where the so-called bad guys are people whose claim on Earth is just as legitimate as our own—not space aliens looking to displace the whole lot of us—the only honest way to separate good from evil is to define those terms. ```json [{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"NewsArticle","@id":"https://time.com/6292855/diplomat-citadel-hijack-thrillers/","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://time.com/6292855/diplomat-citadel-hijack-thrillers/"},"headline":"How TV's Political Thrillers Lost the Plot","datePublished":"2023-07-12T12:00:18.000Z","dateModified":"2026-05-11T04:53:09.345Z","description":"From 'Citadel' to 'Hijack,' shows set within the crucible of politics suddenly seem allergic to political ideas.","url":"https://time.com/6292855/diplomat-citadel-hijack-thrillers/","keywords":["Television","culturepod"],"thumbnailUrl":"https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt9da1ecda7d2ba9ea/698a3e730116826ad8983379/time_repetitive-tv-shows_final_color_b.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=1200:675&height=675","author":[{"@type":"Person","name":"Judy Berman","jobTitle":"TV Critic","url":"https://time.com/author/judy-berman/"}],"articleSection":"Entertainment","image":[{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt9da1ecda7d2ba9ea/698a3e730116826ad8983379/time_repetitive-tv-shows_final_color_b.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=1200:675&height=675","width":1200,"height":675,"headline":"TV Political Thrillers","caption":"","creditText":"Illustration by Kaitlin Brito for TIME","representativeOfPage":true}],"publisher":{"@type":"Organization","name":"Time","url":"https://time.com/","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://time.com/images/logo.png","width":528,"height":156},"foundingDate":"March 3, 1923","sameAs":["https://www.facebook.com/time","https://www.instagram.com/time/?hl=en","https://twitter.com/time","https://www.pinterest.com/timemagazine"]}},{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"BreadcrumbList","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"item":{"@id":"/section/entertainment/","name":"Entertainment"}},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"item":{"@id":"/tag/television/","name":"Television"}},{"@type":"ListItem","position":3,"item":{"@id":"https://time.com/6292855/diplomat-citadel-hijack-thrillers/","name":"How TV's Political Thrillers Lost the Plot"}}]},{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"VideoObject","name":"Parasocial Relationships: How Admiring a Celeb Might Be Healthy","description":"There’s a good chance that you—yes, even you—have had a parasocial experience. 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