‘The Agency’ Review: Michael Fassbender Leads a Stellar Cast in Paramount+ with Showtime’s Promising but Disjointed Spy Thriller
Let’s set a tableau illustrating a Grand Unified Theory of London-Based Spy Shows That Premiered This Fall/Winter.
In our image, the London station CIA team, led by the cast of The Agency, is working in the foreground, as Eidra Park, Ali Ahn’s CIA station chief from The Diplomat, is having a professionally irresponsible lovers’ quarrel with Ato Essandoh’s Stuart in the background.
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Slightly down the Thames, at MI6 headquarters, Lashana Lynch’s Bianca is trying to track down the Jackal (Eddie Redmayne), a methodical assassin not unlike Michael Fassbender’s character from 2023’s The Killer, who himself is similar to Fassbender’s character from The Agency. The latter lives his own semi-monastic life in an apartment in Barbican, which means he’s almost literally across the street from MI5’s Slough House, the refuge of the bumbling, flatulent spooks of Slow Horses.
It’s a bit shadier to explain where Keira Knightley’s character from Netflix’s upcoming Black Doves is getting her espionage done. But all I know is that if Charles (Ted Danson), the septuagenarian mole from Netflix’s A Man on the Inside, is looking to continue his adventures in season two, he should heed the paraphrased words of Samuel Johnson — that he who tires of London-based spy shows, tires of life.
I love London and I like spy dramas, so the current saturation doesn’t bother me at all. It absolutely places a premium, though, on series that know what they are from the beginning and go about their business with some clarity — even if it’s something like Slow Horses, in which the messiness is the business.
The Agency, premiering on the platform jumble that is Paramount+ with Showtime, has many things going for it. The cast, led by Fassbender, Jeffrey Wright and Richard Gere, is bursting with erudite professionalism, and the scripts, by Jez Butterworth & John-Henry Butterworth, occasionally complement their intelligence. Directed in its initial installments by Joe Wright, the series looks terrific and sometimes builds suspense.
What it doesn’t have, at least in early episodes, is much consistency. Each of the three chapters sent to critics has a different set of attributes and different points of frustration, which in turn add up to an overall frustration. It’s completely possible that these elements could come together fluidly by the end of the first season, or that what feels like disjointedness could turn out to be versatility. For now, however, it’s hard to latch onto the show despite its potential.
Fassbender plays a man initially known only as “Martian.” A deep-cover operative, Martian has spent six years in Ethiopia when he’s very abruptly pulled out of the field and sent back to London, forcing him to ditch the married woman (Jodi Turner-Smith’s Sami) he’s bedding. Was it a fling? The job? Or was he in love?
In London, Martian has to get used to a “normal” life that isn’t really that at all. His apartment is bugged. He’s got agents tailing him everywhere he goes. He has a teenage daughter (India Fowler’s Poppy) who has rather mixed feelings about his long stretches of abandonment.
It isn’t completely clear why Martian was yanked, or why he’s back. But his expertise is helpful because a deep-cover operative in Ukraine has vanished and nobody is sure if he was taken out or flipped — which is causing all sorts of consternation for the station chief (Gere’s Bradley), his second-in-command (Wright’s Henry) and the operative’s handlers, past and present (Ambreen Razia’s Blair and John Magaro’s Owen). Meanwhile, Martian is asked to lend a hand in training Daniela (Saura Lightfoot-Leon), a new agent on the verge of being sent to Iran.
Making everything more complicated is the arrival of Dr. Rachel Blake (Harriet Sansom Harris). She’s been sent over from Langley to evaluate mental health across the board, though Martian assumes that she’s actually there to check up on him.
You know the plaque/apron/throw pillow saying that goes, “You don’t have to be crazy to work here, but it helps?” The Agency is You Don’t Have to Be Crazy to Work Here, but It Helps: The Series.
The most interesting part of The Agency is rooted in the idea it’s impossible to come out of what Martian has been through while maintaining your sanity. In fact, it probably isn’t possible to do the job at all. It’s a scary thought — global stability hinging on the careful maintenance of a network of unstable people — that might have been even more provocative 10 years ago when the source French drama Le Bureau des Légendes premiered. At this moment, though, with public-facing leadership of more than a few nuclear powers in the hand of individuals of questionable stability, it maybe feels more quaint than timely.
It’s made quainter still by the fact that the third installment of The Agency halts all narrative momentum to have its characters spell out the thematic subtext of every conversation at every moment, on a level of exposition I’ve rarely witnessed before. Owing to the Butterworths’ theatrical roots, some of the handholding is exceptional, including a top-notch scene with Fassbender and Harris going head-to-head.
At the same time, the episode ends with two characters attending a screening of Catch-22. The reference exists only to pander to viewers who remember that the title refers to Joseph Heller’s conundrum, in which any character who claims insanity to avoid dangerous missions must be sane, but only an insane person (apologies for the dated ableism) could execute those missions. It’s notable that while Heller’s book is a dark comedy, its recent Hulu adaptation found very little of that humor — and that that adaptation was produced by George Clooney and Grant Heslov, who are also producers on The Agency, which doesn’t find much humor in its central circumstance either. I think that’s a Catch-2024.
Fassbender, looking as haggard and haunted as it’s possible for Michael Fassbender to look, brings some wryness to Martian’s unraveling sense of his own identity, In general, however, there’s too much hanging in the balance for humor. Which brings me back around to how those first two episodes differ both from each other and from the expositionally cumbersome third.
The premiere, which runs a full hour, is slow-moving but full of intrigue. Although the plotline involving the asset in Ukraine is introduced with a bracing car chase, Joe Wright’s focus is more on the disorientation experienced by these people tasked with finding the signal in an absolute cacophony of noise. He’s constantly filling the frame with more information than you can handle, forcing both viewers and the characters to parse out what matters.
In this respect, television viewership and spycraft are identical, as illustrated in a scene in which Martian meets trainee Daniela at a bar and instantly quizzes her for details about the civilians she passed by — a sequence hilariously identical to a moment in the pilot for A Man on the Inside.
The first chapter tells you almost nothing about any of the characters other than Martian, but requires your observation of how the characters talk, how they interact, how they dress, where they’re positioned within the office. It leaves a lot of work for the actors to do with very little written material. But when you have actors as good as Wright, Magaro, Harris and especially and most subtly Gere, the effect is exactly as desired: You get a sense of a workplace without requiring a guided tour around the workplace.
It’s such a great cast that when Dominic West appears in a couple of scenes via Zoom, it’s just like, “Sure, why not?” It’s such a great cast that I was mostly willing to ignore how many scenes involve British actors doing so-so American accents either listing things or correcting British slang.
In contrast to the meticulously directed first episode, the second is chaotic. A single mission, related to the Ukraine thing, again tells you about the actors and characters based on how they behave under pressure. I like the idea a lot! There’s torture and interrogation and … it turned out to concentrate on none of the things I liked about the first episode. But it did it breathlessly. I just didn’t care very much.
So is The Agency the show from the first episode? The show from the second episode? Or the show from the third episode? Having demonstrated that it can do mood and pace and theme, but only separately, is it a show that can bring all these facets together? Is it a show that cares about relationships? About psychology? About process? Again, it’s proven the ability already to be about those things in bits and pieces, but not to connect them together. What’s good here has bought the series some patience. What’s unformed and ungainly here makes that patience finite.
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