It's a few hours into a June day of shooting on the New York set of AMC's Rubicon. The set is breathlessly quiet, and the show's star, James Badge Dale, is staring at a photograph.

The quiet is finally broken when Dale's character, Will Travers, begins jotting down notes on index cards with a Sharpie. That's right: With four episodes of the conspiracy thriller's first season left to shoot, there are no car bombs, no sniper fire, no creepy phone calls — just the squeak of the marker moving over paper.

Rubicon's James Badge Dale: "Our show is not for everybody"

"We're spinning a yarn. We're trying to do something different than what's normally done on television, and it's not going to be for everybody," Dale tells TVGuide.com during a break. "We want to do something subtle. ... We're asking people to sit down and be taken on a ride, albeit not a very fast one. There's a certain sense of trust required in our sense of pace and sense of tone. But there's payoff in the end."

Says executive producer Henry Bromell: "At no point does this thing become 24 or Lost."

At the center of what Bromell calls a character-driven story is Travers, a bookish intelligence analyst who is locked in grief following the death of his wife and child during 9/11. During his work at the American Policy Institute, he uncovers a crossword puzzle pattern in some of the nation's largest newspapers, and sharing that information with his boss gets his boss killed, leaving Will as the new team leader.

"[These analysts] do a lot of different things and a lot of it is actually quite mundane," Dale says. "I think that's what excites Will so much about finding the pattern in the crossword puzzle. That's the great white whale for a lot of these people. And I think that keeps them going."