It will be months, if not years, before we get the announcement of a new James Bond. Longer still to get another Bond movie. Argylle, although moderately entertaining, flopped. And the Mission Impossible franchise is seemingly coming to an explosive end with The Final Reckoning next May. But, thankfully, TV studios are churning out spy shows like they’ve been paid off by the CIA. And who doesn’t want to see Michael Fassbender, doing his best American accent, as a gruff CIA agent sneaking around the London streets after dark?
Fassbender stars as Martian in The Agency, a Paramount+/Showtime series based on French show Le Bureau des Légendes. The London set-show, which co-stars Richard Gere as CIA station chief Bosko and Jodie Turner-Smith as Martin’s mysterious love interest Sami, has all the trappings of a compelling espionage thriller. Martian has recently been pulled out of deep cover in Africa and summoned back to London, where the bureau is entangled in all sorts of missions, from the Ukraine to Iran. He’s being tailed and investigated by the CIA themselves, which is apparently standard, but Martian’s connection to Sami threatens to derail both of their careers. The first two episodes, which premiered on Nov. 29, introduce high-level intrigue courtesy of writers Jez Butterworth and John-Henry Butterworth and director Joe Wright, making a foray into television.
The Agency, set to air weekly through Jan. 24, arrives hand-in-hand with Netflix’s series Black Doves, another London-based spy show created by Joe Barton that premieres Dec. 5. Keira Knightley plays Helen, the wife of a Tori government minister who is part of a secretive group of operatives called the Black Doves. After a man she was having an affair with is murdered, Helen becomes embroiled in a complex, multi-government plot alongside her handler Reed (Sarah Lancashire) and her partner (a pitch-perfect Ben Whishaw). It’s bloody, entertaining and showcases a charismatic dynamic between Knightley and Whishaw that will hopefully yield a second season.
As it happens, both shows traverse London landscape and center their action in the modern-looking American Embassy, which opened in Nine Elms in 2017. The building is also a setting for Netflix’s The Diplomat, a popular series that debuted its second season in late October. Each show spins its own take on the spy genre, with The Diplomat focused more on the political machinations of the embassy and its ambassador, but it’s notable that European-set espionage shows are captivating viewers across streaming. The Day of the Jackal, based on the 1973 film, brought its assassin vs. spy action across both London and the continent, with Lashana Lynch’s MI6 agent on the tail of Eddie Redmayne’s skilled killer. The Peacock series, which airs its finale on Dec. 12, was recently renewed for a second season. Even Michael Schur’s poignant new comedy, A Man on the Inside, dabbles in the spy genre with Ted Danson as a senior citizen who investigates a theft in a San Francisco retirement home. Meanwhile, the fourth season of Slow Horses recently wrapped up (with two more on the way) a second season of The Night Manager is currently in production.
But why are we so fixated on the intelligence game? Spy fiction has been perpetually popular, first in books and then onscreen. Alias, Homeland and The Americans exemplified just how good the genre could be on TV, all notably also focused on the U.S. perspective with complex, flawed characters who vacillated between heroic and problematic. Fassbender’s Martian and Knightley’s Helen share these characteristics—it’s often hard for the audience to discern their ultimate motives. There are a lot of grey areas here, like in The Day of the Jackal, which asks you to root for both protagonists, who share a predilection for doing whatever it takes to get the job done, no matter how immoral. And perhaps we like this unpredictability of our heroes, who may not be so heroic after all. What would you do given the opportunity? How far would you go? Who would you kill, and how?
Most TV viewers have no illusions that they’ll ever be in the shoes of a spy, as thrilling as it appears from afar. Instead, we live vicariously through the characters, who jet between aspirational locations and leap off buildings with little concern for their knees. If only we too could gracefully descend three stories and pop up unharmed while firing perfect shots at a Russian thug. If only our lives were so exciting that we had 10 passports and a drawer full of foreign currency. It’s the reason we seek exhilaration from our entertainment, returning episode after episode to see how it all turns out. Both The Agency and Black Doves are mired in complicated narratives with high stakes. Do the plots always make total sense? No. But there is a lot at stake and that’s what ultimately matters. Paramount+/Showtime made an apt decision to air The Agency weekly, as Peacock did with The Day of the Jackal. It’s more fun that way, with cliffhangers that keep you coming back for more (the six episodes of Black Doves will be devoured in a weekend).
TV has always been good at spy shows, partially because of this serialized format. The more we get to know these characters, the more intriguing they become. As we saw on Alias and The Americans, there are endless missions for our onscreen spies to undertake. Putting them in new, uncertain situations and seeing how they react is what brought us “Baggage,” the perfectly-crafted season three episode of The Americans. Is why the first few seasons of Killing Eve were so deeply compelling, and it’s why Amazon Prime Video’s Mr. & Mrs. Smith remake felt so revelatory.
Somewhere in the background of the American Embassy in The Agency and Black Doves people are doing paperwork and answering phones. And that would probably be a more realistic depiction of global intelligence. But we want to see Knightly, in one of her best roles to date, ruthlessly take down the people who killed her lover. We want to see Fassbender, once a possible candidate for Bond, lose his tail and game his own handlers. Who cares what real spies do when we can these fictional ones. So, for now, it doesn’t matter that we are years away from another Bond movie or that Tom Cruise is supposedly hanging up his parachute. TV has all the espionage stories we need.