Tracy Ifeachor is uniquely cognizant of what it means to play Tara Colman in the current political climate. An investigative journalist who’s unraveling what’s going on with a secret government project that many people would kill to protect? Might not be reality, but we’re living in a world where it feels like it could very well be.
And that’s one of the things that makes Treadstone so interesting, and unique.
The show started as a prequel to the very well-known Bourne series of books and movies, which Tracy herself has been a “huge fan of, for so many years,” and someone who has seen “every movie, several times.” But, following the Bourne way of doing things, in this show “you never fully know what you’re in for.”
Project Treadstone, as envisioned in the books, was a top-secret black ops program of the CIA that recruited service members to turn them into nearly superhuman assassins. The program used behavior-modification techniques to break down the assassins’ morality and make them into living weapons.
That, however, isn’t all the show is. Call this one a spy thriller/mystery/character study, if you will. Because the show has a little of everything. Tracy went as far as to call it “a really clever spin” on what you think you know, which includes not just the above mentioned program, but even the idea of what some people are capable of doing.
As someone who hasn’t missed an episode, that sounds pretty on point to me.
For Tracy, in particular, playing an investigative journalist, at a time when investigative journalists are being criticized left and right, their credibility put into question, and their jobs attacked, felt like “a real important thing to be doing,” especially, because, as Tracy so aptly put it, we live in a world where “truth has become subjective.”
“People make statements, and that can be true depending on who looked at it” Tracy emphasized, as we went into the parallels between a show that should feel like absolutely removed from reality and a word where “truth used to be absolute,” and now, all the sudden, it isn’t.
Maybe that’s why it feels like Treadstone has even more relevance than we thought it was going to have when it was first announced. No one expected to feel like reality was some sort of Cold-War spy thriller.
Tara Colman, in particular, represents what we all want from our media, someone who “wasn’t allowed to report the truth, and because she didn’t want to be complicit in any way, had to step away,” which is where we find her in the first episode, sorta dejected and angry, but still very much the kind of person, the kind of journalist, that can unravel a story.
During the course of the season, Tracy teased, we’ll see her go “down that rabbit hole,” even if, as Tracy pointed out, she isn’t exactly “an amazing super spy,” like so many of the people that surround her.
In my eyes, that makes her even more extraordinary. Tara is us, and she’s meant to be “the eyes of the audience” in this show, but I think, more importantly, she’s there to show us that you can always stand up for what you believe in, you can always fight, and you can always help make things better.
Even if you aren’t a super spy, or a superhero.
Or, at Tracy put it, “I hope her storyline encourages others to be bold,” and to believe that, often times “disappointment is just success delayed slightly.”
Especially because Treadstone takes such care to present strong women, diverse women, and women who break stereotypes and “make no apologies for being women.” This should be the norm on TV, but it is still, sadly, the exception to the rule, and that’s why when a show does such a good job as this one is doing, we must not just point it out, but do it loudly enough that others can pay attention.
Interestingly enough, this feeling that the show is doing something different and groundbreaking isn’t just something I feel from the outside, but something Tracy agreed could be felt from the inside, something she said was “a testament to the showrunner, and the whole team.”
“The cast is really close,” she shared. “We hang out, we love each other.” And that’s probably why she would love to see Tara on screen with any of them.
As for us? Well, we kind of want the very diverse women on this show to find themselves on the same side. You know, for reasons and science.
Agree? Disagree? Share with us in the comments below!
Treadstone airs Tuesdays at 10/9c on USA Network.
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