Paramount’s remake of Le Bureau des Légendes has a near-fatal flaw.

The agencyI’m sorry to say, missing it je ne sais quoi of Le Bureau des Légendes.

If only I had come across Showtime’s new spy thriller have never seen its source material, the mid-2010s French drama known in English as Bureau. I would have no idea that anything could be missing—that je ne sais quoi of the original – or that there was another way to be for “Martian”, Michael Fassbender’s dead-in-the-eyes-spy-who-came-in-from-the-cold character. I wouldn’t know that the French external security service is more pleasant (at least in TV dramas) than the CIA, which is so often portrayed as a lover of violence (see: Lioness), bumbling (see: The Menacing Tower), and far too bureaucratic (see: The agencywhere several lines are spent arguing about the relatively small cost, given the CIA’s multibillion-dollar budget, of ejecting a source from a bad situation). But the fact is that I do know. And while I keep going The agency—I have seen the first three episodes — I expect to feel some ennui for the duration of the first season.

The American remake hews almost shockingly close to the original. Joe Wright (Reconciliation, Pride and Prejudice) directed the first few episodes, and while the first episode is not a shot-for-shot repeat of the Le Bureau‘s, it’s damn close. Characters mirror each other and the narrative elements are the same: a spy called back to headquarters must quickly end a love affair in his undercover posting, hole up in a safe house for months before he can return to home base to train a new agent set to be deployed to Iran, and be reunited with his daughter. Meanwhile, in a parallel plotline, another undercover agent overseas has gotten drunk, been arrested and disappeared – possibly into enemy arms, with his cover potentially blown. Lots of things happening!

But as I saw The agency, I had the feeling that everything was rushed; I really couldn’t connect with any of the characters, except for Jeffrey Wright’s Henry, the Martian boss, who is constantly plagued by malaise. To be fair, Fassbender’s Martian is really the only way I can imagine a spy played by Fassbender to be: detached, unreadable, icy. I love Michael Fassbender because he is both so warm and so profoundly weird – both qualities stick The agency. Hans Martian is only half a step away from his role as the unnamed assassin in David Fincher’s Netflix film The killerwhere he executes both Vinyasa yoga sequences and murders with balletic tenacity. He doesn’t kill anyone The agency (yet, anyway), but his nervousness is intact.

That would be fine, except that his French counterpart i Le Bureau-“Malotru”, played by Mathieu Kassovitz – is the opposite: warm, soulful, deeply connected to others in and out of the spy business and to us, the viewers. We feel his passion for and sweetness towards Nadia, his forbidden love, and we root for them both from the first moment. Everything is so, well, French! He always has red wine around and he smokes. He seems like a father, an ex-husband and a lover. He’s someone we’d know, except he’s a spy. We believe in his essential goodness even though he breaks rules everywhere. We believe that he does it all for i love four –for Nadia and for France. We love him so much.

Maybe the creators of The agency decided they needed to break from Kassovitz’s portrayal to differentiate their show. Or maybe when Fassbender signed on, they had to make his Martian a different (read: hot and weird) kind of guy instead of one we’d actually like. Regardless, there is, for me, a near-fatal flaw in the decision: the forbidden relationship between our spy and his girlfriend lacks the actual chemistry required to underpin so much of what’s sure to come. The agencygiven what happens in Le Bureau. This love affair has implications for global security! There is some sex between Martian and Sami (Jodie Turner-Smith), an Ethiopian historian he met during his secondment in Addis Ababa. But there is no electricity. Sami can vote over the words, also almost straight away Le Bureau– It was dangerous. It was wrong. It had no future. But I wouldn’t have missed it for the world” – but it feels rote more than it does wistful.

I have some other complaints, but the funniest and most pedantic is that Richard Gere, who plays the head of the London CIA office where Martian is based, repeatedly refers to JSOC (the Joint Special Operations Command) as JSOC when he has to pronounced “jaysock”. Come now! And why is British motley middle-aged heartthrob Dominic West playing the director of the CIA? There really wasn’t a single square American for that role? (No offense to Dominic West, but really!)

The agency premieres Thanksgiving weekend, and what I can say is: This would be a totally great show to watch with relatives. It’s smart, it moves, it has great people in it. You might have to pause and explain things — like when the series suddenly takes us to Ukraine or Belarus — to your old uncle. But you will enjoy it. And then when you have a chance for some temporary workers seultry Le Bureau. I am grateful for that The agencyat least gave me a chance to go back to one encore.