Despite many star names attached, the opening two episodes of The Agency are a bit of a slog
“Should have told him about the back-up back-up”
There’s rarely been a lack of spy shows but the proliferation of streaming providers means that we’re in quite the purple patch for premium espionage drama with starry casts. Slow Horses continues to buck the trend of AppleTV+ shows not registering to the larger consciousness, Sky have just dropped The Day of the Jackal and nipping in ahead of Netflix’s Black Doves, Paramount+ have premiered the first two episode of Jez Butterworth’s The Agency with Michael Fassbender heading up its cast.
Created by Butterworth with brother John-Henry Butterworth and based on a French series Le Bureau des Légendes by Eric Rochant, The Agency boasts star names aplenty: Jodie Turner-Smith, Jeffrey Wright and Richard Gere also feature in the cast; George Clooney is one of the many executive producers; and Joe Wright directs the first two episodes. But for all these credits, these opening two episodes are a bit of a slog to get through, a curious choice to introduce such a tentpole product.
Fassbinder plays Martian, a US spy who is pulled from a six-year undercover stretch with barely any notice and isn’t particularly happy about it. Turner-Smith plays Dr Sami Zahir, the woman he became emotionally entangled with and who may or may not be entirely trustworthy. We also follow the wider business of this department, responsible for training and handling deep-cover officers as they prep a new recruit set to go to Iran to identify and recruit intelligence sources there.
There’s obviously a lot to set up here, and it is impossible to critique it fully on just two episodes but on this evidence, there’s a long way to go for the series to bring it all to fruition. The pacing is punishingly slow, there’s little sense of specificity about any of the characters, whether new recruits or multiple bosses (Wright, Gere and Alex Jennings all fall into this category), too little personality emerging from the whole thing and so it is already something I’m not particularly looking forward to revisiting.
