Revolution

Our Review

Fifteen years after every circuit on Earth burned out at once, the Midwest is farmland again, the Interstate is a footpath, and the best weapons in America are katanas. That was the pitch Eric Kripke carried into J.J. Abrams’ office in 2011, and that fall it worked: the September 17, 2012 pilot pulled 11.65 million viewers, the biggest new-drama launch of the season, and for a few months the water-cooler argument was whether the lights coming back was worth what the Monroe Republic was doing to keep them off. Revolution is the show NBC’s prestige era almost was: big, sincere, occasionally ridiculous, filmed in the rain and the weeds with real conviction.

The engine is a road trip with a mystery stapled to it. Billy Burke plays Miles Matheson, a former Marine who put his sword down to run a quiet village, and Tracy Spiridakos is Charlie, the daughter who picks the sword back up when the militia kills their keepers and the trail to answers runs through her family’s buried secrets. Around them Kripke stacked a cast that outgrew the premise: Giancarlo Esposito’s Tom Neville is the best thing the show ever produced, a garrison commander doing his duty in a uniform he stopped believing in, and Elizabeth Mitchell’s season two arrival as Rachel, the scientist who may have built the blackout device, is the course correction that finally made the mythology pay rent.

History is the spoiler, though, so here it is honestly: season one is an uneven adventure that survives on its pilot, its production design and Esposito, rated 55% on Rotten Tomatoes with the critics’ consensus politely calling it entertainment that could work harder. Season two, moved to Wednesday nights and given a steadier hand, is the one the fans defend: 79% on RT, tighter plotting, Neville promoted to the moral center of the war, and a finale NBC cancelled on May 9, 2014 mid-cliffhanger. That cliffhanger is the show’s permanent condition. The story does not conclude on television; the actual ending landed in a 2015 four-issue comic miniseries, which is either the most poetic possible fate for a show about a world without screens or just insulting, depending on how you feel about the season two finale’s last shot.

Ours is 6 out of 10, which is really two numbers in a trench coat: the first season plays like Lost with crossbows, hook-forward and character-back, and the reshoot-heavy middle sags. The second is a genuinely good network drama that nobody was allowed to see, and if you’re going to spend a weekend in 2027’s America, worth doing: watch at the pilot, be patient to The Dark Tower, then let season two cash the checks. Available to buy episode-by-episode (Amazon, Apple TV Store, Fandango At Home; Hoopla carries it free with a library card in the US), no flat streaming service, so the buttons below are the honest answer and the purchase option is the real one.