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The US is promoting its new spy series, “Treadstone,” laying claim to a piece of the big screen Matt Damon” Bourne ” franchise, courtesy of series co-producer Jeffrey Weiner, who has worked on both projects.

That’s all well and good, but tredstone won’t make anyone forget Jason Bourne. Airing Tuesdays at 10 p.m., it’s built around a jumbled, convoluted storyline highlighted by scenes of amped-up, cartoonish violence (Ki’s over-enthusiastic audio of bones snapping and blades cutting through flesh) and screeching-tire car chases and crashes. It’s all tied together with dark photography, which seems to go to the cinematic template for spy dramas. (The series was filmed in Budapest.)

“Treadstone” jumps back and forth in time, from 1973’s East Berlin to the present day, and borrows its MacGuffin from ” the Manchurian candidate.” Here, it’s “Frere Jacques” – instead of a game of solitaire – that causes the worldwide dormant brain cells of killer agents to be somehow linked to the North Korean missile program and a 70s-era Soviet Union initiative called Cicada, which was “designed to create human weapons.”

Or something like that.

The cast of characters both past and present includes CIA agent J. Randolph Bentley (Jeremy Irvine), a heroic Vietnam vet tasked with murdering an ex-Nazi doctor who’s manufacturing cold-blooded killers; Tara Coleman (Tracy Ifeachor), a discredited journalist who knows too much about North Korea’s secret missile plans; Doug McKenna (Brian J. Smith), a laid off oil rig worker susceptible to “Frere Jacques”; Soyun (Hyo Joo Han), a placid North Korean piano teacher drawn into the spy saga by uncontrollable impulses; and Petra, a KGB agent played in flashbacks and present-day by Emilia Schule and Gabrielle Scharnitzky, respectively.

The presence of veteran actors Michelle Forbes (“True blood, “”Murder”) and Omar Metwally (“the Case, “”Mr. Robot”) as veteran CIA agents grounds the series somewhat (they’re always good), but I’ve had a hard time tracking with a tight storyline (too many characters and too many plot tangents). The cast, meanwhile, is burdened with banal descriptive dialogue: “You let them take you and it gave me enough time to escape,” bentley’s wartime buddy tells him – while Cicada is described as ” an unauthorized black OPS program run rampage!”I think it is?

“Treadstone” Premieres on October 15 and will air for the next nine weeks, giving viewers plenty of time to make up their own minds – – – but as spy dramas go, it’s best left out in the cold.