Michael Fassbender isn’t necessarily the best fit for The Agency’s leading man, an elite CIA operative brought back to the London office after years undercover in Sudan. In a mid-season scene, Martian, as he’s code-named, has to let an adversary thoroughly beat his ass so as not to blow his cover as a bookish teacher turned novelist. But this is Fassbender we’re talking about, all gritted teeth, the body of a Greek god. Wouldn’t you clock this guy in a crowd? Wouldn’t his assailant break a toe kicking that six-pack?
Fassbender may be too obviously statuesque for real spycraft, but his performance of an agent cracking under the weight of existential turmoil is so hypnotic that one forgives the incongruous casting choice. An American remake of the great French spy drama Le Bureau des Légendes (also known as The Bureau), The Agency draws from the familiar tradition of spies distorting and destroying everything they touch, not least themselves. Compared with the recent boom of espionage series subverting the traditionally self-serious genre — Slow Horses’s lovable losers, Black Doves’s anarchic sense of humor, The Day of the Jackal’s soap-opera goofiness — this preoccupation seems damn near old-fashioned. But every element of The Agency, from its tangible depiction of spywork to gunmetal-cool cinematography to a killer cast, is operating at the highest possible level. Spy thrillers don’t get much better than this.
The pilot opens with Martian’s uneasiness returning to his old life after spending so long in the field. As he juggles the responsibilities of his new management role, he pines for Sami (Jodie Turner-Smith), the lover he left behind in Sudan. Glimpses of their past suggest it’s the stuff of swooning action-packed romance: A flashback shows the couple evading danger after armed men crash a protest Sami was speaking at. When Martian learns Sami is in London for secret talks over the future of Sudan, he becomes the latest victim of his profession’s essential contradiction: Risk national security to reunite with his love, or eschew a chance at happiness for the sake of his country? Fassbender sells the conflict with an uneasy stillness betrayed by his persistently searching eyes. Even alone in the dark of his apartment, Martian can’t settle in. It’s as if his original identity, the one he just returned to, is just another temporary cover.
The Agency takes its time to depict the technical pitter-patter of espionage: swapping vehicles in underground parking lots, staring at spreadsheets for targets, sweeping an apartment for bugs. This attention to detail is oddly compelling, feeding the sense you’re watching a finely tuned system populated by capable operators, all of whom bring their own personalities and quirks to the enterprise. Because as much as The Agency hums along on Martian’s existential drama, it’s also, quietly, a workplace sitcom. Station chief Bosko, despite being imbued with Richard Gere’s star power, is fundamentally a grumpy bureaucrat pushing his team for results at the behest of Dominic West’s pugnacious CIA director, and there’s real delight in watching Gere flip off a subordinate as he takes a reprimand from another superior. Jeffrey Wright’s Henry, a gentler middle-management soul, has the misfortune of being longtime mentor to the subtly megalomaniacal Martian while suffering the everyday indignities of corporate life, including rats in his office. These interpersonal politics add a verisimilitude that’s central to The Agency’s allure: For all the grandiose mythology surrounding state espionagework, it’s still just a job. Professional spies might be dealing with life-or-death stakes on a daily basis, but they’re also people who jockey over meeting rooms, too.
This is all true to The Agency’s source material. Led by showrunners Jez and John-Henry Butterworth, the Showtime series is an American adaptation of the critically acclaimed French series The Bureau, which ran for five seasons between 2015 and 2020. Indeed, for large swaths of the show, The Agency is even a beat-for-beat remake; an early sequence in which Martian runs a new employee through a quick trial at a café re-creates the same scene in the French series almost word for word. This isn’t a bad thing. The Bureau, for my money, ranks among the best television ever made largely for the same reasons The Agency works so well: It’s cerebral; it’s sweeping; it feels like a plausible facsimile of real-world espionage concerns. But the heights of The Bureau also stem from how it’s so very French. That Malotru (Mathieu Kassovitz), the French counterpart to Martian, is willing to throw aside patriotism for love is very New Wave. Watching operatives from the DGSE, the French equivalent to the CIA, skulk around the gorgeous streets of Paris is half the fun, and you can even see something approximating the French self-image of a country in tune with life’s finer comforts in the many expository sequences of DGSE spies chatting over better-than-average cafeteria salads. As The Bureau progresses through its seasons, the series emerges as a kind of meditation on postcolonial France, a country that must deal with geopolitical crises in regions tied to its imperial history without getting stomped on by the Americans.
This context makes The Agency’s near-beat-for-beat closeness to its source material a little curious. It appears intent on seeing out The Bureau’s course, albeit with modernizing tweaks and American flourishes: There’s more rah-rah action; the CIA’s digs are much grander than the DGSE’s; an operation set in Algeria during The Bureau now takes place on the front lines of the Russia-Ukraine conflict. But there are unavoidable key differences that shift the original series’ thematic texture. The Bureau told the story of a spy adrift, working in the shadow of a faded empire. Over the course of that series, Malotru tumbles deeper into ambiguity over whose loyalties he ultimately serves. The Agency seems to be telling the same story but swapping in America for France adds a poignant timeliness. Watching The Agency, which is set in 2023, in the lead-up to a second Trump administration — with all of the president-elect’s neo–Manifest Destiny gesticulations toward acquiring Greenland and the Panama Canal as well as the further dissolution of world order that his return to power portends — is uncanny. As Martian inches closer to the line of throwing his country aside, what’s pulling him forward is the dream of his own life. But watching the world around us, it’s hard not to sense he’s being pushed, too.