Treadstone - Jason Bourne spinoff series by USA Network

[bat39]

Surprisingly enough, this one hasn't gotten a lot of attention online.

Treadstone just got its first official trailer online. Its a spin-off TV series set in the universe of the Jason Bourne films and will follow a bunch of other agents from the Treadstone project that Bourne was a part of.

Here's the trailer:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OxLETCDS9j4

And here's an interview that the showrunner did with EW:

https://ew.com/tv/2019/08/09/watch-e...er-treadstone/

The trailer looks good, though it doesn't reveal much. Personally, I'd rather just have Jason Bourne back on-screen, but in his absence, exploring the Treadstone project is the next best step.

I feel that this series could be successful at what The Bourne Legacy, starring Jeremy Renner, tried to do years ago. That movie had some great ideas but ultimately didn't click because it tried to cram too much world-building into a single movie without much of a compelling narrative. I think a TV series is really a much better medium for expanding the universe of Jason Bourne.

[Caivu]

I'm not a fan of how this fuzzes up the Bourne universe. Jason Bourne wasn't a sleeper agent, he just happened to get amnesia while on a mission as the result of an injury. But now Treadstone had a project that did functionally the same thing this whole time?

[AJBopp]

I'm not a fan of how this fuzzes up the Bourne universe. Jason Bourne wasn't a sleeper agent, he just happened to get amnesia while on a mission as the result of an injury. But now Treadstone had a project that did functionally the same thing this whole time?

Yeah. This seems ... Forced and unnecessary

[Seth_Brower]

I'm ... always a bit amused at the shift away from the concept of the original novels that they went with in the feature film adaptations. I guess they really couldn't really include Carlos the Jackal as just general knowledge of him has really fallen off since it was initially conceived.

[SUPERECWFAN1]

This could be an interesting series. Will give it a look.

[bat39]

I'm not a fan of how this fuzzes up the Bourne universe. Jason Bourne wasn't a sleeper agent, he just happened to get amnesia while on a mission as the result of an injury. But now Treadstone had a project that did functionally the same thing this whole time?

Yeah, I was a bit iffy about that part as well. It depends on how they ultimately handle it of course.

A lot of people, particularly those who've probably only seen The Bourne Ultimatum and not the first two films, seem to have the idea that his Treadstone training was responsible for his amnesia. They draw the link between the conditioning we saw in Ultimatum and rumors of the real-life MK-Ultra program which allegedly was an effort to create assassins who would execute targets and then forget about it. So on some level, I guess this series is playing into those ideas.

One theory I have is that these new sleeper agents could have been modelled after Jason Bourne. Treadstone saw what happened to Bourne and realized that maybe an agent with amnesia might not be such a bad idea!

I'm ... always a bit amused at the shift away from the concept of the original novels that they went with in the feature film adaptations. I guess they really couldn't really include Carlos the Jackal as just general knowledge of him has really fallen off since it was initially conceived.

The films are fundamentally a very different animal from the books...even on an ideological basis, forget about plot.

While the books had their fair share of corrupt power-hungry government agents, for the most part, the CIA and Treadstone were portrayed as the good guys - a necessary evil keeping the world safe from terrorists like Carlos. Whereas the films for the most part had a pretty negative outlook on the CIA, and portray Bourne as someone trying to atone for his past as an assassin, rather than as a heroic agent with a tragic past.