Michael Fassbender in Showtime’s Spy Thriller

Let’s set a tableau illustrating a Grand Unified Theory of London-based spy shows that premiered this fall/winter.

In our picture, the London station’s CIA team, led by the cast The agencyworks in the foreground, as Eidra Park, Ali Ahn’s CIA station chief from The Diplomathas a professionally irresponsible dating argument with Ato Essandoh’s Stuart in the background.

Just down the Thames, at MI6 headquarters, Lashana Lynch’s Bianca tries to track down the Jackal (Eddie Redmayne), a methodical assassin not unlike Michael Fassbender’s character from 2023’s. The killerwhich itself resembles Fassbender’s character from The agency. The latter lives his own semi-monastic life in a flat in the Barbican, which means he is almost literally across the street from MI5’s Slough House, the haven for the lumpy, flatulent ghosts of Slow horses.

It’s a bit shadier to explain where Keira Knightley’s character from Netflix comes from Black Pigeons gets his espionage done. But all I know is that if Charles (Ted Danson), the septuagenarian mole from Netflix’s A man on the insidelooking to continue his adventures in season two, he should heed the paraphrased words of Samuel Johnson – that whoever gets tired of London-based spy shows gets tired of life.

I love London and I like spy dramas so the current saturation doesn’t bother me at all. However, it definitely puts a premium on shows that know what they are from the start and go about their business with some clarity – even if it’s something like slow horses, how messed up the business is.

The agencypremiering on the platform jumble that is Paramount+ with Showtime has a lot going for it. The cast, led by Fassbender, Jeffrey Wright and Richard Gere, is bursting with erudite professionalism, and the scripts by Jez Butterworth & John-Henry Butterworth occasionally complement their intelligence. Directed in the first few episodes by Joe Wright, the series looks fantastic and creates suspense at times.

What it doesn’t have, at least in the early episodes, is much consistency. Each of the three chapters sent to critics has a different set of attributes and different points of frustration, which in turn add up to a general frustration. It’s entirely possible that these elements could come together at the end of the first season, or that what feels like incoherence could turn out to be versatility. For now, though, the show is hard to come by despite its potential.

Fassbender plays a man originally known only as “The Martian”. Martian is a deep-cover agent and has spent six years in Ethiopia when he is very abruptly pulled out of the field and sent back to London, forcing him to ditch the married woman (Jodi Turner-Smith’s Sami) who he is in bed with. Was it a fling? The job? Or was he in love?

In London, Martian has to get used to a “normal” life, which really isn’t at all. His apartment is bugged. He has agents following him everywhere he goes. He has a teenage daughter (India Fowler’s Poppy) who has rather mixed feelings about his long stretches of abandonment.

It’s not entirely clear why the Martian was moved or why he’s back. But his expertise comes in handy because a deep-cover agent in the Ukraine has gone missing and no one is sure if he was taken out or turned — causing all sorts of consternation for the station commander (Gere’s Bradley), his second-in-command (Wright’s Henry) and the operator’s handlers, past and present (Ambreen Razias Blair and John Magaros Owen). Meanwhile, Martian is asked to lend a hand in training Daniela (Saura Lightfoot-Leon), a new agent on the verge of being sent to Iran.

Making everything more complicated is the arrival of Dr. Rachel Blake (Harriet Sansom Harris). She’s been sent over from Langley to evaluate mental health across the board, though the Martian assumes she’s actually there to check up on him.

You know the plaque/apron/pillow that says, “You don’t have to be crazy to work here, but it helps?” The agency is You don’t have to be crazy to work here, but it helps: The series.

The most interesting part of The agency is rooted in the idea that it is impossible to recover from what the Martian has been through while still maintaining one’s sanity. In fact, it is probably not possible to do the job at all. It’s a terrifying thought — global stability depends on the careful maintenance of a network of unstable people — that was perhaps even more provocative 10 years ago, when the source of the French drama Le Bureau des Légendes premiered. But at this moment, with publicly facing leadership of more than a few nuclear powers in the hands of individuals of questionable stability, it feels perhaps more peculiar than timely.

It is made quainter still by the fact that the third installment of The agency suspends all narrative momentum to have the characters spell out the thematic subtext of every conversation at every moment, at a level of exposure I’ve rarely witnessed before. Because of the Butterworths’ theatrical roots, some of the hand-holding is exceptional, including a climactic scene with Fassbender and Harris walking side-by-side.

At the same time, the episode ends with two characters participating in a screening of Catch-22. The reference exists only to express that viewers who remember the title refers to Joseph Heller’s conundrum where any character who claims to be insane to avoid dangerous missions must be sane, but only an insane person (sorry for the dated skill) could perform these missions. It is noteworthy that while Heller’s book is a dark comedy, its recent Hulu adaptation found very little of that humor — and that this adaptation was produced by George Clooney and Grant Heslov, who also produced The agencywho also doesn’t find much humor in its central circumstance. I think it’s a Catch-2024.

Fassbender, looking as haggard and haunted as it’s possible for Michael Fassbender to look, brings something wry to the Martian’s unraveling sense of his own identity. In general, however, there is too much hanging in the balance for humor. Which brings me back to how the first two episodes differ both from each other and from the expositionally cumbersome third.

The premiere, which runs a full hour, is slow-moving but full of intrigue. Although the plot line involving the asset in Ukraine is introduced with a bracing car chase, Joe Wright’s focus is more on the disorientation experienced by these people tasked with finding the signal in an absolute cacophony of noise. He constantly fills the frame with more information than you can handle, forcing both viewers and the characters to analyze what matters.

In this respect, TV ratings and spycraft are identical, as illustrated in a scene where Martian meets intern Daniela in a bar and immediately asks her for details about the civilians she passed – a sequence hilariously identical to a moment in the pilot for A man on the inside.

The first chapter tells you almost nothing about any of the characters beyond the Martian, but requires your observation of how the characters speak, how they interact, how they dress, where they are located in the office. That leaves a lot of work for the actors with very little written material. But when you have such good actors as Wright, Magaro, Harris and especially and most subtly Gere, the effect is exactly as desired: You get a sense of a workplace without requiring a guided tour around the workplace.

It’s such a great cast that when Dominic West appears in a few scenes via Zoom, it’s just like, “Well, why not?” It’s such a great cast that I was mostly willing to ignore how many scenes involve British actors doing so-so American accents, either listing things or correcting British slang.

In contrast to the meticulously directed first episode, the second is chaotic. A single mission, related to the Ukraine thing, again tells you about the actors and characters based on how they behave under pressure. I like the idea very much! There’s torture and interrogation and… it turned out to concentrate on none of the things I liked about the first episode. But it made it breathless. I just didn’t care.

It is too The agency the show from the first episode? The show from the second episode? Or the show from the third episode? Having demonstrated that it can do mood and pace and theme, but only separately, is it a show that can bring all these facets together? Is it a show that cares about relationships? About psychology? About the process? Again, it has proven the ability to already deal with these things in bits and pieces, but not to connect them together. The good thing here has given the series some patience. What is unformed and clumsy here makes this patience limited.