When you spend six years living someone else’s life in Ethiopia, coming back to a desk in London isn’t just a commute change. It’s a full-blown psychological breakdown waiting to happen. That’s the cold, paranoid heart of The Agency, an Americanized redo of Éric Rochant’s acclaimed French espionage thriller Le Bureau des Légendes (The Bureau). It trades flashy, martini-sipping Bond Eurospy silliness — which I love, remember — for the kind of slow-burn bureaucratic dread that makes you check your rearview mirror twice.
Created and written by brothers Jez and John-Henry Butterworth (Edge of Tomorrow, Ford v Ferrari, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny) and executive produced by George Clooney and Grant Heslov (who also steps behind the camera for two episodes, alongside Atonement and Hanna director Joe Wright, The Crown’s Philip Martin, The Illusionist’s Neil Burger and Zetna Fuentes), the series drops us right into the wreckage of an extraction. Michael Fassbender (X-Men: First Class, The Killer, Inglourious Basterds) plays Brandon Colby, a deep-cover CIA non-official cover operative known as Martian. When Langley abruptly yanks him out of Africa and brings him back to London Station, he’s supposed to shed his alias—Paul Lewis—and re-assimilate into normal life, which includes reconnecting with his estranged teenage daughter Poppy (India Fowler, The Nevers, Fear Street: Prom Queen).
Spies are terrible at letting go. The biggest complication isn’t a double agent in the basement. It’s Dr. Samia Zahir (Jodie Turner-Smith, Queen & Slim, After Yang, White Noise), a married Sudanese anthropology professor Martian fell hard for while undercover. When Sami unexpectedly turns up in London for a six-month academic stint, Martian breaks every rule in the Langley playbook by slipping back into his Paul Lewis skin to see her. Naturally, the agency already has watchers watching the watchers—including field agents nicknamed Grandpa (Andrew Brooke, Sherlock, Bullet Train) and Grandma (Adam Nagaitis, Chornobyl, The Terror)—and before long, Martian’s personal entanglement collides head-on with a clandestine, high-stakes geopolitical deal between Sudan, China and a ruthless Sudanese intelligence operative named Osman (Kurt Egyiawan, Beasts of No Nation, House of the Dragon).
Meanwhile, London Station is already on fire. A valuable—and alcoholic—CIA asset in Belarus codenamed Coyote (Alex Reznik) gets arrested and goes dark, threatening to blow open covert U.S. operations in occupied Ukraine, including a Delta Force black-op team led by Dr. Charlie Remy (Edward Holcroft, Kingsman: The Secret Service, London Spy). That puts immense heat on Coyote’s case officer Owen Lublin (John Magaro, First Cow, Past Lives, The Many Saints of Newark), Deputy Station Chief and Martian’s mentor Henry Ogletree (Jeffrey Wright, American Fiction, The Batman, Casino Royale), and Station Chief James “Bosko” Bradley (Richard Gere, American Gigolo, An Officer and a Gentleman, Pretty Woman), who plays his cards so close to his vest you wonder if he’s even holding a hand.
If that wasn’t enough plate-spinning, Martian and his former handler Naomi Ford (Katherine Waterston, Inherent Vice, Alien: Covenant, Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them) are simultaneously breaking in rookie operative Daniela “Danny” Ruiz Morata (Saura Lightfoot-Leon, Masters of the Air, Hoard), putting her through brutal psychological and physical vetting to infiltrate an Iranian seismology program run by Professor Reza Mortazevi (Reza Brojerdi). Throw in visiting CIA shrink Dr. Rachel Blake (Harriet Sansom Harris, Frasier, Licorice Pizza, Memento) trying to figure out if Martian has completely lost his mind, and senior MI6 official Jim Richardson (Hugh Bonneville, Downton Abbey, Paddington) playing his own shadowy angles and you’ve got ten hours of thick, tangled spycraft.
We live in an era where half of TV espionage is either brain-dead action-heroics or smug puzzle-box nonsense, so there’s something deeply satisfying about watching a show that treats intelligence work like a soul-crushing, morally bankrupt grind where everyone is lying to their therapist, their boss and themselves. Fassbender—who has spent plenty of his career as ice-cold professionals—is dialed all the way in here, letting the cracks show just enough beneath that rigid posture to remind you how dangerous a compromised spy really is. Pairing him with Jeffrey Wright and Richard Gere gives the London office scenes the kind of heavyweight gravity that makes even a quiet conversation in a stairwell feel like someone’s about to get burned. It’s dense, deliberate, and doesn’t hold your hand—the kind of adult thriller that trusts you to pay attention.
Paramount’s three-disc DVD set includes all ten episodes of Season One (running roughly 480–498 minutes in 1.78:1 widescreen with English Dolby Digital 5.1 audio and English SDH subtitles). There aren’t any bonus features tucked onto the discs, and physical media purists in the States will have to settle for standard-definition DVD since Paramount skipped a domestic Blu-ray release—though if you want to own a physical copy of one of the sharpest, most cynical spy shows on television without relying on streaming subscriptions, this set gets the job done. You can get this from Deep Discount.
