Ukraine and Russia are at war. Political instability and civil war rage in Sudan. Iran is ramping up its nuclear capabilities. The world is basically a mess in “The Agency,” the new espionage series that inundates the viewer with rapidly intersecting story lines set on an increasingly complicated geopolitical playing field.
The series, which premiered last week on Paramount+ (with the Showtime tier), is part of a surge in spy shows that also includes “The Day of the Jackal,” on Peacock; “Black Doves,” premiering Dec. 5 on Netflix; and “Slow Horses,” which wrapped up its fourth season on Apple TV+ this fall.
True to the genre, these series jet all over the globe (though mostly Europe) and unfold in high-tech command centers and in dark urban alleyways, via thrilling shootouts and furtive meetups. Some operatives pursue sanctioned missions as others go rogue. Multiple cats chase multiple mice, and it’s not always clear who is which.
The most pitched battles, however, happen within the hearts and minds of the individual players. Even as the new spy shows reflect a fraught, tangled and mercenary post-Cold War world, the existential threats and conflicts are more interior, intimate and, in many ways, timeless.
“It’s the agency,” a Central Intelligence Agency honcho (Jeffrey Wright) tells a field agent (Michael Fassbender) in “The Agency.” “Nothing is personal.” Nothing, that is, except everything.
Based on the French series “The Bureau,” “The Agency” is as much about divided souls as a divided world. The most divided is an undercover agent known as Martian (Fassbender), who is called back to the C.I.A. London station from Addis Ababa, where he appears to have fallen in love with Sami (Jodie Turner-Smith).
Yanked away from his fake identity as a writer and his life with his beloved, Martian doesn’t know which way is up. “He gets the bends,” said Jez Butterworth, who wrote and executive produced the 10-episode first season with his brother, John-Henry Butterworth. “Our story shows the effects of that on him, and on everyone in his life.
“I’m fascinated by that sudden about-face that these people have to do,” he continued. “You’re lying; you’re lying; you’re lying. And then you’re gone.” Except in Martian’s case, Sami follows him, creating a new world of problems back in London.
These spies get rattled. In the process, they show that they’re just as messed up as anyone watching at home.
“We’re saying, ‘Be careful not to rely on these people too much, because they are just human like you and I,’” said Joe Wright, an “Agency” executive producer who also directed the first two episodes. “I think it’s always dangerous to either put people on a pedestal or demonize people and throw them to the gutter, in drama and in life. We are all just trying to do the best we can, and more often than not failing miserably.”
The spy genre was once defined by highly skilled adventurers like James Bond and various “Mission Impossible” heroes, but questions of identity and authenticity in such stories are hardly new. The Jason Bourne movies, based on Robert Ludlum’s novels, send an amnesiac operative careening through the world, guided by a fundamental question: Who am I? On television, series such as “Homeland” (2011-20), “The Americans” (2013-18) and “Killing Eve” (2018-22) play with the instability of personality and the thin line between playing a role and becoming that role.
Spy series and movies have become less white and male, with stars like Sandra Oh (“Killing Eve”), Zoe Saldaña (“Special Ops: Lioness”) and Jeffrey Wright (various James Bond movies before “The Agency”). And less strictly heterosexual: Sexual tension charged the dynamic between Oh and Jodie Comer in “Killing Eve,” and a major subplot in “Black Doves” centers on a hit man’s relationship with his ex-boyfriend. Loyalties have grown much murkier, with fewer spies operating out of purely patriotic or ideological interests.
However, as Jeffrey Wright observed, the more human conflicts take precedence. “The political tensions really just serve as highly detailed atmospherics,” he said in an interview.
Or, in the words of Saura Lightfoot-Leon, who plays a young operative thrown into the deep end befriending an Iranian nuclear engineer: “It’s really about the intensity of the sacrifice that is asked of these people. It isn’t a flashy spy show. It’s showing the reality of people who exist for this work.”
Such questions also run through “Black Doves,” which stars Keira Knightley as Helen, a member of an espionage-for-hire organization. Assigned to cozy up to a rising British politician, she ends up marrying and having children with him, then falls in love with a sexy civil servant — who is subsequently murdered. Was he killed because of her? Was he sent by someone else to infiltrate her life, much as she entered the life of the man she married? Is anybody here whom they say they are? And, most pressing of all, what is the human toll of all this subterfuge and chaos?
Pity anyone who grows attached to these people. “I would call it a relationship drama that takes place in the world of espionage rather than a full on spy show,” said Joe Barton, the “Black Doves” writer, creator and executive producer. “For me, the espionage element was secondary to the human relationships.”
Like Peacock’s “The Day of the Jackal,” which follows an MI6 agent (played by Lashana Lynch) tracking an enigmatic assassin (Eddie Redmayne) hired by a corporate third party, “Black Doves” operates in the sphere of for-profit espionage. Its spymasters are beholden to no country and have no problem assigning a little murder-for-hire when the occasion (or the bottom line) calls for it.
Helen grows close to her hit man protector, Sam, played by Ben Whishaw. Sam embodies the twisted allegiances that animate shows like “Black Doves” — he reports both to Helen’s mysterious handler, played by Sarah Lancashire, and to a cagey underworld veteran, played by Kathryn Hunter.
“She is in the sort of lower echelons of the killing game, but there’s still a lot at stake for her,” Hunter said of her character, Lenny, in an interview. Unlike most of the characters in “Black Doves,” Lenny seems to know exactly what her true calling is.
“Slow Horses,” which chronicles the misadventures of a team of British spy rejects consigned to the dirty-job scrapheap, made its own Bourne-like identity gambit in its most recent season. A former agent, played by Jonathan Pryce, has fallen into dementia, a clear problem for a man whose job required him to file away high-security secrets in his head. Suddenly the “Who am I?” question takes on national security gravity. More poignantly, it sends a once-proud spy grasping for answers in the air.
“It’s very sad and very moving,” said the “Slow Horses” showrunner Will Smith in an interview. “And it’s wonderful to have something like that, that you’d normally find in more of a broader drama.”
We live in an age largely devoted to the elusive balance between work and life, so often sought and discussed, less often achieved. (This idea is explored most explicitly in a show that has nothing to do with espionage, “Severance,” in which corporate employees undergo a surgery that makes them forget the outside world when they enter the office.)
In these spy series, compartmentalizing is impossible, no matter how high the stakes. For Martian, for Helen, work is life, life is work, and the true self falls somewhere in between the gaps, never to be found. They can’t leave the secrets and lies at the office — the worst parts of their profession become their truest identities.
To Joe Wright, the current interest in complicated spies connects to a broader push-pull in society between public and private, transparency and obfuscation.
“I see that in politics, and I see that in social media,” he said. “It’s about how we present ourselves in different forums and what we’re hiding, what we’re covering up — and also possibly a desire to cover up less, to live more authentically.”
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