Dan Brown's The Lost Symbol makes the critical mistake of portraying Robert Langdon as a total a**hole

Mashable

"Dan Brown's Robert Langdon books aren't complicated," says Alexis Need of the Peacock drama starring Ashley Zukerman as Langdon. "All five of them adhere to the same formula, wherein Langdon, a middle-aged Harvard professor of 'symbology,' gets wrapped up in an age-old conspiracy involving a secret society and must follow historical clues hidden in famous landmarks or artworks to solve a mystery with his attractive lady sidekick before a zealot of some form or another murders him. That's it. Those are all the books. The international locations and cheesy thrills of the series lend themselves easily to adaptation, and three of the five (The Da Vinci Code, Angels & Demons, and Inferno) have appeared on the big screen in zippy, fast-moving films starring Tom Hanks as Robert Langdon. The Lost Symbol on Peacock is the first time anyone has tried to stretch one of Brown's books into a television series. This will be regarded in the future as a bad move. Not only is The Lost Symbol the novel the weakest of Brown's five Langdon adventures (which is probably why no one made it into a movie), The Lost Symbol the TV show makes a critical mistake that renders the show difficult to watch: It makes Robert Langdon a total a**hole. In The Lost Symbol, Robert Langdon's (Ashley Zukerman) wealthy mentor Peter Solomon (Eddie Izzard), a high-ranking Freemason, is kidnapped. Naturally, this becomes Robert's problem, so he teams up with Solomon's daughter Katherine (Valorie Curry) to follow an ancient path of enlightenment hidden in the Mason-inspired art and architecture of Washington DC. This is all par for the course for a Langdon adventure, except that this time Langdon is around 30 years old, which makes his Harvard-tested competence come off as arrogance and his nerdy need to explain things comes off as mansplaining nonsense. Other portrayals of Robert Langdon have worked because he's an unlikely hero. He's older, a little awkward, and when played by Tom Hanks, he has a wry sense of humor about what a huge dork he is. The Langdon of The Lost Symbol is a dork who labors under the youthful delusion that he is either not a dork or the king dork to whom all other dorks must bow."

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• The Lost Symbol never finds an enjoyable way to interpret Dan Brown’s trademark reliance on a main character whose superpower is mansplaining: "This is the kind of book-to-movie-to-TV brand-mining that NBC has tried to do repeatedly," says Daniel Fienberg. "Think The Firm. Think Lincoln Rhyme: Hunt for the Bone Collector. Think Hannibal. That one of those three shows somehow became a towering artistic achievement with almost no broadcast compromises is one of the great oddities of 21st century TV, but the Hannibal formula isn’t one that anybody is trying to reproduce here. The Lost Symbol is a straightforward adaptation, held back by many of the same things that stymied Ron Howard’s three (apparently, though I remember only two) attempts to adapt Dan Brown novels for the big screen. Langdon is a character who travels the globe and usually is racing against life-and-death stakes, but at the same time he’s a character whose modus operandi is staring at things, saying 'I know these symbols' and then explaining them to everybody in the room, whether they care or not. He needs to have supporting characters with him to justify his monologuing, but even when a character has practical applications — Katherine’s New Agey expertise becomes useful in exactly one scene in three episodes — that means he’s talking only 80 percent of the time as opposed to 100."
• The Lost Symbol just never feels as adventurous and ambitious as its source material, and maybe that’s because the entire affair feels five years too late: "With so much exposition and so many things still waiting to be deciphered, it makes these early episodes of The Lost Symbol feel incredibly aimless, almost like the plot is being tweaked as things go along," says Kristen Lopez. "Running alongside the pyramid chase is additional backstory following Peter’s family and his fractured relationship with his son, Zachary (Keenan Jolliff), who spent time in a Turkish prison. How this all connects to a man covered head-to-toe in tattoos (a Dan Brown staple) remains to be seen, but (Eddie) Izzard is certainly game for anything, including one particular big surprise in the pilot. The rest of the cast is mired in standard TV movie drama poses, looking into the camera with concern as serious music thumps in the background."
• Ashley Zukerman imbues Langdon with more dorkiness than the character’s often overly suave literary counterpart:  "This man is an art history professor, after all! In the books, Brown goes out of his way to remind readers constantly that not only is Langdon a scholar, but also a tall, athletic water polo player and a sexy heartthrob with 'bedroom eyes' who can’t stop women from hitting on him constantly," says Petrana Radulovic. "The TV version of Langdon is more like an enthusiastic puppy, just starting out on his adventures. It’s endearing, and turns the character from a male power fantasy — the James Bond of the art history world — into someone more relatable (and definitely more likable than his book counterpart). This version of Langdon doesn’t totally deviate from the novels, but by positioning itself as a prequel, The Lost Symbol promises an actual arc for the Langdon character instead of just dragging him along for a wild plot. And could any of the plot feasibly or logically happen? No, not at all — as is the charm of Robert Langdon’s adventure."
• Episodes are fast-paced and engaging, especially if you know what you’re getting yourself into: "But for audiences who often get invested in the mythology of a series and enjoy piecing the puzzle together themselves, The Lost Symbol may come up short," says Radhika Menon. "One of the seminal rules of writing is 'show don’t tell'—show audiences your story through actions and try not to rely on explanatory dialogue to get a point across. In a story like this, it’s almost impossible to not lean heavily on telling your audience everything because the story demands it. Zukerman has to recite lines that explain what a symbol is, why it’s important, and how he even knows it’s a symbol in the first place. In turn, as an audience, we have to suspend whatever interest we might have in Sherlock Holmes-ing the story because there is no choice but to rely on the show to tell us what to look for."
• Ashley Zukerman took a piece of advice from Dan Brown himself that really unlocked who Robert Langdon was for him: "Those books are such that if you're a person of faith, you read them through that lens, and maybe it offers you an argument for reason, and if you're a person of reason, then it offers you an argument for faith," he says. "I absolutely read the books believing that the unknown was impossible, that magic isn't real, that fact is fact and fiction is fiction, but that is my personal M.O."