Spy stories are everywhere on TV. Here’s another for your list
The Bureau remains one of the most viewed, commented upon and appreciated French TV series throughout the world. This new series – with a stellar cast including Michael Fassbender, Jeffrey Wright, Jodie Turner-Smith and Richard Gere – is based on it, and will grip you.
It seems we can’t get enough of stories of deception, intrigue, betrayal, and duplicity. Spy stories are everywhere on TV at the moment. The Day of the Jackal recently landed, Slow Horses has just ended but a new season is on the way, and the highly anticipated Black Doves, zany and full of bodies, is with us. And we are lapping up these stories of shifting ambiguities and cynical manipulation.
There’s something about double standards that appeals to us. We love those morally dubious heroes who pursue seemingly unscrupulous ideals. And the way spies cope with their individual predicaments, and somehow manage to maintain their identity, fascinates us.
Ian Fleming wrote in 1967 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 and he began saving the nation in those wonderfully preposterous moral fantasies.
The latest TV version is The Agency, originally entitled The Department, a taut, compelling, highly cinematic espionage thriller created by Jez and John-Henry Butterworth, with George Clooney and Grant Heslov among the producers. The Butterworths have co-written big films such as Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, Ford v Ferrari, and Edge of Tomorrow. Jez is also a Tony Award and Olivier Award-winning playwright for his plays and John-Henry collaborated with David E. Kelley on Nine Perfect Strangers.
Joe Wright directs the first two episodes, establishing the visual tone and aesthetic style, and executive produces. Wright made his feature directorial debut with the 2005 adaptation of Pride and Prejudice starring Keira Knightley and has since directed critically acclaimed films such as Atonement and Hanna.
There’s a bunch of production companies involved, including Clooney and Heslov’s Smokehouse Pictures, its name taken from the Smoke House restaurant across the road from Warner Bros Studios in California. They have an enviable track record, including movies The Man Who Stare at Goats, Argo and The Monument Men, and TV series such as the underrated dark comedy On Becoming a God in Central America.
And there’s a stellar cast too including Michael Fassbender, Jeffrey Wright, Jodie Turner-Smith and Richard Gere. All are splendid, in top form.
The new series is an example of the way the best spy fiction, in its more introspective manifestations, uses the context of espionage to explore themes concerned with the moral, political or emotional consequences of intelligence work. And The Agency looks at the psychological damage caused by the way that spies behave, their lives so makeshift and their lies so damaging, hardly the invigorating adventure for gentlemen as it was originally described in fiction.
The Agency is based on the French hit Le Bureau des Legendes, a workplace espionage thriller set primarily in a section of the Direction Generale de la Securite Exterieure, or DGSE – France’s equivalent of the CIA.
The Bureau debuted in 2015 and aired in 112 markets. Le Figaro called it the best series ever made in France and its success made Mathieu Kassovitz, who plays the lead character, Guillaume Debailly, codenamed Malotru, an international star. The Bureau remains one of the most viewed, commented upon and appreciated French TV series throughout the world.
And much of it involves operatives and analysts diligently working on their high-powered computers as they organise, or salvage, clandestine operations a long way from France. This is not a spy story in the heroic mould, with devilish master criminals and lashings of sex.
There is an underlying sense of suspense in the quietness that characterises Le Bureau, a kind of workplace drama, as much as there is for the agents in the field. Lives are at stake as the handlers wrangle their operatives, in contact with them in many secretive ways. (“That’s the legacy of John le Carre: Office scenes that are exciting because power is at stake,” creator Eric Rochant told the New York Times.)
“It’s a show about this line of work, the intelligence world, and I always felt that doing this show is a real opportunity to describe the work, to describe the universe, for people who don’t know it,” Rochant says. “This world is intriguing, it’s mysterious, and people really want a look inside this world, but they can’t get it in real life, because it’s secret.”
Rochant fervently believed the success of his show was due to the sense of realism and the plausibility of its depiction of the process of spying. “We have taken a mysterious and intriguing world and opened it up in a realistic way. I think that’s what makes the series a success. Now, is that replicable? I don’t know. You’d need another mysterious and intriguing milieu, and you’d need to explore in a similar way.”
And this is just what The Agency does. It follows Fassbender’s “Martian”, a CIA operative operating in Africa for six years under the cover name of Paul Lewis, who is abruptly called back to London Station. But when the woman he left behind, Jodie Turner-Smith’s Dr. Sami Zahir, suddenly also turns up in London, the game changes.
Will he throw his career away for love? How long can anyone lie for a living? For their country? Does he secretly long for something real after a life of deceit? “I was really always looking for places in which he was lying and places in which he was being authentic, and the conflict between those two aspects of his life and playing those ideas,” the director says.
Jeffery Wright plays Henry Ogletree, the CIA’s director of operations and a mentor to Martian, and a feisty Gere is Bosko, the London Station chief with a past that includes eight years undercover. He’s a boss who loves barking at his underlings.
The new series, directed with a kind of glacial elegance by Joe Wright, shares with its counterpart a flawless sense of control over all its elements, and, if initially a little disconcerting, of low-key intensity.
It shares with the original what Rochant calls a “credible realism”, and an eerie spookiness. After all, the black thread that binds together its many subplots is the double standard; unprincipled ends are pursued by its characters, justification by results the only moral law.
I’m sure high-octane action will follow as the drama develops just as it did in Le Bureau, but the initial impression is one of restraint and patience – the same qualities we are told motivate agents. “We watch, we position, we learn, we vanish,” Martian tells a young agent he is tasked with training for the field on his return.
Her name is Daniela (Saura Lightfoot-Leon), and she’s to go to Iran to identify and recruit intelligence sources there. “Here, but not there, engaging but forgettable, too far out and you never get what you need, too close in, you become the target.”
Martian seeks simple plausibility in everything he does but seems tired and discontent, irritated by the protocols imposed by his masters.
Like Martian, the show is impeccably controlled in its tone, meditative almost, but gripping as various plots are outlined that will obviously continue to be developed in the same fashion as The Bureau unfolded. And like Rochant’s original the emphasis is on plausibility at the expense of action-based high jinks.
The first episode, The Bends, begins with Martian arriving back in London after abruptly being pulled out of his undercover assignment in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, leaving his lover Sami behind. (She is married to someone else; we later learn.)
He’s debriefed by his handler, Naomi (Katherine Waterston), asked how it went with her, what strategy was used to disengage. “I went for spineless, dash of pathetic, sprinkle of selfish, blah, blah, not forgetting blah,” he says. “She never wants to see my face again.” It’s a lie from an agent for whom it’s second nature.
A second plot quickly asserts itself when an agent named Coyote (Alex Reznik) drunkenly becomes involved in a police chase in Belarus and disappears. There’s consternation at London Central. He knows secrets and various agents – suddenly many covert operations in Russia and Ukraine are jeopardised. Did he organise his own disappearance? Is he really a double agent?
Then, an explosion at Khartoum University, where Sami works, upsets Martian. He sneakily obtains a burner phone – like all returned agents he’s under constant surveillance – and rings her. The storylines are starting to intersect.
I was hooked, despite the deliberateness of the plotting, taken by the polish of Wright’s direction, the sense of paranoia and mystery he creates. It promises to become a tantalising psychological exploration of the landscape of betrayal.
The Agency streaming on Paramount+.
