Netflix’s Treason is excellent, sexy TV and the morals of espionage

A seemingly honourable father is seduced into the secret service and forced to choose between his country and those he loves.

Olga Kurylenko in Treason on Netflix

I’ve just caught the British espionage thriller Treason and it’s nicely done. Diverting and entertaining, its five episodes are short enough and delivered at such a rattling pace that it’s easy to overlook its unfortunate implausibilities.

There’s an attractive and strong cast at its centre too, in the rather loveable Charlie Cox, formidably attractive Olga Kurylenko, the accomplished Oona Chaplin and Ciaran Hinds in an imposing performance.

It was created and co-written by multi-award winner Matt Charman, who was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay for his 2015 film Bridge of Spies, directed by Steven Spielberg and which he co-wrote with Joel and Ethan Coen.

He says he learned a lot about espionage and met with many involved with the so-called great game, as Rudyard Kipling described it when he introduced the reading public to the romance of the international spy, a character who became a hero of 20th-century popular literature and film.

Years later, in 1962, Ian Fleming wrote of espionage in The Spy Who Loved Me, “It’s nothing but a complicated game, but then so is international politics, diplomacy, all of the trappings of nationalism and the power complex that goes on between countries. Nobody will stop playing the game. That’s the appeal of spy novels today to the readers and despots.” And they’ve lost none of their attraction since Fleming invented Bond, who began saving the nation in those wonderfully preposterous moral fantasies.

Charman though with this series was looking for something a little more grounded, less fantastical and less dependent on those lovely gadgets so beloved of shows about the secret service. “With spy stuff, you can fill a show like this with equipment and gadgets and the rest of it, believe me that stuff exists like those little bits of kit, they are used in the field by agents, but setting a show up with whizzy bits technology doesn’t really help me tell the story,” he says.

Instead, he wanted to write something about contending roles, forced compromises and the problems of being honest with those you love when you happen to be a spy.

“Out of those meetings, it became really clear to me that there was a fascinating story to be told with a spy who was in charge of his country’s secrets, but also was a father, a husband and a family man, and how those two roles would compete,” Charman says.

And Treason is a taut, tightly controlled espionage thriller about that secret and unknown world propelled by the notion of duplicity, revenge and mendacity. It deals with the effect it all has on a seemingly honourable man with a loving family but somehow seduced into the top role as head of the UK’s secret service – and maybe suborned by his country’s enemies.

“What happens if you get someone in a situation where he doesn’t know whether to choose his country or his family?” Charman says. “All of these really, truthfully, fairly ordinary spies, people who you might have passed in the street and not think twice about: not all these guys look like Daniel Craig, maybe there’s a more interesting story to be told with those tensions that someone might have in that role.”

It reminded me a little of Undercover, Peter Moffat’s brilliant drama of several years ago, which looked at a political operative who has been working undercover for 20 years. His exposure threatens the career and life of his wife, a defence lawyer, about to become the first black Director of Public Prosecutions. Moffatt was inspired by the investigation led by Lord Justice Pitchford into undercover agents who had infiltrated British political groups and established relationships, sometimes sexual, with key figures.

Treason is not based on any actual case; Charman wants to present his audience with the complexity of international relations, “of secret information, of things being leaked. Russia is obviously a player in that but not an easy target.” It was also written at a time when the UK was shedding leaders at a somewhat alarming rate, creating all sorts of security problems, and these factors form a resonant subplot in the series.

Cox stars as Adam Lawrence, a charming, youthful second-in-command at MI6, married to Chaplin’s Maddy, a former artillery officer turned physical therapist. Adam has two kids from a previous marriage, a teenage daughter (Beau Gadsdon) and younger son (Samuel Leakey). They are a staunch lot, tightly-knit, the children calling Maddy “Mum”, and supportive of their father’s clandestine career. (He’s always leaving the room to take calls.)

The story actually starts somewhere in the middle. An unnamed gunman, looking just a bit military, is tracking Adam and his family in their home. There seems to be some sort of disagreement between him and his wife but then the sniper’s sights lift to target their son on a different floor.

We cut back in time. It’s five days earlier and MI6 chief Sir Martin Angelis, played with grouchy authority by Ciaran Hinds, is poisoned at an exclusive club by a young woman who turns out to be the former Russian operative Kara Yusova, played superbly by Ukrainian actress Olga Kurylenko.

The boss, known as “C” for chief or commander, has been involved over drinks in a little blackmail against his guest, the president of the Supreme Court. MI6, it seems, has intel that he has a mistress and favours are called in. The situation is made more complex by the continuing election of the new prime minister.

Adam is instantly promoted and must find the culprit but is himself compromised when Yusova, his former lover, calls him and they meet after 15 years. The Russian has managed to separate herself from Russian supervision, though still on their radar, and tells Adam how she has been spoonfeeding the British with raw intelligence in order to accelerate his rapid rise through British ranks.

She is still on a revenge mission following the death of five of her operative during a mission years earlier known as “the Baku case” in which Adam was a leading field operative as well. She wants to collect what he owes her, information that only he can access in the MI6 files.

The scene is set and the conventions for Charman’s narrative are quickly outlined. How do you live that double life for years on end? It’s hard to imagine the massive, near-intolerable pressures of living such a lie over years and decades. And as a writer he cleverly reflects the labyrinthine world of bluff and counterbluff, of suspicion and paranoia, of corruption and betrayal that distinguishes the secret services.

It works off that myth of the internal conspiracy that still fascinates us so long after the paranoiac vision of Cold War espionage storytelling so bleakly popularised by John Carre, Len Deighton and Adam Hall. And Treason is full of narrative tricks. It’s already another winner for Netflix, a finely crafted, adult-minded serial built around arcs of interconnected action unfolding over the life of a series.

Charman’s plotting is nicely labyrinthine crammed with signs, symbols and clues. It does in fact remind one of Le Carre and his followers who developed their own intricate versions of treachery and incompetence within the secret establishment, and the way their heroes realised they had lost their ability to differentiate between right and wrong.

Still there are flaws, though quickly skimmed over given the pace of the narrative. London is the most surveilled city in the world yet Charman’s characters are always shooting off for unobserved liaisons. There’s not a camera in sight.

They talk constantly on mobile phones yet it’s become such a cliche of crime TV that these devices are always sending out GPS co-ordinates communicating with cell towers allowing the kind of triangulation that exposes people. And the security afforded Adam and his family is unconscionably lax. Adam, though a former field officer, is too easily able to dump his detail. At one point his daughter wanders off into possible danger without a care in the world.

These moments we can live with. Charman, while he settles his story around family, is good at the elaborate nuts and bolts, the twists and turns and doubling back, of espionage fiction, the world of traitors and double agents. He leaves us constantly trying to determine motive: who of these central characters would want to betray their country in the first place.

Treason streaming on Netflix.