Michael Fassbender is ideal for this remake of a classic spy thriller
The Agency ★★★★
Paramount+
In this quietly gripping espionage thriller, Michael Fassbender plays a CIA agent code named “Martian”. It’s a fitting handle: after six years undercover in Ethiopia the spy is like an alien. Martian searches his work-provided London apartment for bugs – he finds three – and navigates office chit-chat with locked-down wariness. He doesn’t want anyone to know who he really is, and as the season takes shapes it’s suggested that’s because Martian himself doesn’t actually know who he is.
India Fowler and Michael Fassbender in The Agency.Credit: Paramount+
With his chiselled facial features and mournful eyes, Martian is the perfect role for Fassbender, a movie star who excels at uneasy minimalism and icy retorts. Even as he works on a crisis in Belarus, where a CIA agent has gone missing, Martian lies to his superior, Henry Ogletree (Jeffrey Wright), about his connection to Samia Zahir (Jodie Turner-Smith), the Sudanese academic he was in love with. When she turns up in London, Martian is both excited and suspicious.
Already renewed for a second season, The Agency is adapted from the masterful French series The Bureau (Paramount+ has all five seasons). The show’s creators, playwrights and screenwriters Jez and John-Henry Butterworth (Ford v Ferrari), have hewed closely not just to that show’s plot, with Martian also training Daniela (Saura Lightfoot-Leon), a young agent taking the first steps towards an undercover assignment in Iran, but also its air of permanent tension and split-second calculations.
While the CIA offers a different, larger perspective than France’s DGSE, The Agency for the most part refuses to hold the audience’s hands. Commentary from an injured Martian comes via a flash-forward with unknown interrogators, and the narrative is always testing the audience in a similar way to Martian: who really is this person? What do they actually want? Some of Martian’s most loaded exchanges come with his bemused teenage daughter, Poppy (India Fowler), who knows who he works for.
Richard Gere in The Agency.Credit: AP
Over the first four episodes previewed there are flashes of action, mostly involving an operation in war-torn Ukraine that not even the CIA station chief, Bosco (Richard Gere), has access to. The considered pacing, and labyrinthine storytelling, feel apt. This is a show that knows what it is building to, over this season and future ones. It’s the antithesis of both Netflix and Apple TV+’s London spy shows, respectively Black Doves and Slow Horses, and worthy in its own right.
Martian’s logic is dangerous but compelling – no balanced person could do what he does. When a CIA psychologist evaluates him, Martian offers telling reassurance: “You’re worried I may have become sane.” In some tragic way, he knows exactly who he is.
Audrey Fleurot (centre) plays a detective who tends to get underestimated in HIP: High Intellectual Potential.Credit: AcornTV
HIP: High Intellectual Potential ★★★½
AMC+
I’ve been itching to see High Intellectual Potential, a crime procedural that’s been one of the best reviewed network series to debut in America this year, but Disney+ is currently keeping its powder dry locally. So I did some sleuthing of my own and found the French series it’s based on, which hits the sweet spot for those wanting a case of the weekly mystery with a genuinely idiosyncratic detective. Whatever the language, it’s an obvious hit.
Armed only with a feather duster, Morgane Alvaro (a terrific Audrey Fleurot) cleans the Lille police station at night. No one notices the single mother of three until she knocks over a folder with crime scene photos, takes one look at them and leaves a crucial analysis on the detective squad’s whiteboard. A working-class savant with a 160 IQ and anti-authoritarian impulses, Morgane does Sherlock-style deductions without the theatrics. She’s quickly hired as a consultant.
Partnered with the initially unimpressed Inspector Adam Karadec (Mehdi Nebbou), Morgane is brilliant but bolshy. The show never forgets that for all her skills she’s been excluded by mainstream society – suspects underestimate her at their peril – and there’s a droll strand of humour in her offbeat examples of how Morgane acquired her knowledge (hint: she’s not big on textbooks). The longer French episodes meander a touch, but there are three solid seasons available. A good year for procedural fans just got better.
Colman Domingo in The Madness.Credit: Netflix
The Madness
Netflix
Following on from his Academy Award nomination for best actor in the civil rights biopic Rustin, character actor Colman Domingo graduates to series headliner with a committed turn in this solid if sometimes predictable conspiracy thriller. He plays Muncie Daniels, a cable news pundit whose writing break at a remote cabin leads to him being framed for the murder of a white supremacist. Muncie has to stay alive and clear his name, but the show also examines how a prominent black man in America just becomes a black man in America when trouble looms.
The Beatles arrive at JFK Airport in New York in Beatles ’64.Credit: Apple
Beatles ’64
Disney+
It’s episodic and somewhat jumbled, cutting between cinema verité footage of The Beatles’ first fortnight in America with contemporary encounters such as producer Martin Scorsese chatting with drummer Ringo Starr, but it’s difficult to deny the energy and engagement that emerges from David Tedeschi’s documentary. Teenage fans from the tour offer contemporary reminiscences that mostly sidestep nostalgia, but what shines through is the voracious curiosity and working-class energy of the Fab Four. In the midst of upending popular culture, they’re cracking jokes, dancing in clubs and showcasing their Scouser wit.
Julie Hesmondhalgh and Toby Jones in Mr Bates vs The Post Office.
Mr Bates vs the Post Office
BritBox
Just a reminder that one of the best British shows of the year has a new home on BritBox. Anchored by Toby Jones’ heartbreakingly stoic performance, Gwyneth Hughes’ drama recreates the staggering injustice that began in the early 2000s when the British Post Office rolled out new sales and accounting software to the small business owners running local outlets. Jones’ Alan Bates is one of thousands wrongly prosecuted for theft or fraud due to faults in the software, a failing that was covered until a dogged public campaign won out.
Creature Commandos is a hectic adult animation series.
Creature Commandos
Binge
Guardians of the Galaxy writer and director James Gunn now runs Marvel’s blockbuster rival DC Studios, where he’s rebooting the underperforming comic book movie business with a new Superman in 2025. But Gunn has also found time to write this hectic adult animation series, which has spy master Amanda Waller (Viola Davis) assembling a team of “non-human”, operatives to do her bidding. Enter Doctor Phosphorus (Alan Tudyk) and The Bride (Indira Varma). As with Gunn’s 2021 live-action movie The Suicide Squad, this is a chaotic mix of blood-spattered violence and sardonic camaraderie.
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