The Agency is the rare show that trusts its viewers to keep up

The Agency, the Paramount+ With Showtime series that ends its first season this week, avoids the clichés of spy culture by emphasizing the human toll of deception over the suave charm of espionage. More The Spy Who Came In From The Cold than The Man From U.N.C.L.E., this remake of the French show Le Bureau Des Légendes (The Bureau) drew the talents of one of the most pedigreed ensembles in years through sharp writing that never talks down to viewers—something that can’t be said about a lot of mainstream television in the 2020s. The show expects people to meet it halfway, not only tracking multiple chess pieces on the board of this international game but reaching conclusions about how their shifting allegiances shape their actions. It’s a story of people forced to leave their humanity at the door in the name of international safety. And that humanity always comes knocking.

Essentially, The Agency tracks three different spy arcs, leaving it largely up to the viewer to connect them thematically. The primary one centers on Brandon Cunningham (Michael Fassbender), codename “Martian,” who has been extracted from an undercover operation in Addis Ababa, where he lived for six years. Over that time, he fell in love with a woman, Dr. Samia Fatima Zahir (Jodie Turner-Smith), who knew Martian as Paul Lewis. He left “Sami” behind to return to the London CIA office, reuniting with his estranged daughter Poppy (India Fowler). While there, he’s increasingly concerned about how much he’s monitored by superiors like Deputy Station Chief Henry Ogletree (Jeffrey Wright) and Station Chief James Bradley (Richard Gere). As clinical psychologist Dr. Rachel Blake (Harriet Sansom Harris) forces Martian into uncomfortable conversations to reacclimate him to the real world, Sami comes crashing back into his life and becomes the center of an international crisis involving Sudan, China, and the United States. 

Martian’s tale is relatively familiar, one that feels particularly inspired by John le Carré, who often trafficked in stories about the difficulty of shedding one identity for another. This archetypal narrative is strengthened by how it’s intertwined and contrasted with two other undercover arcs. In the most urgent one, a cover agent nicknamed Coyote (Alex Reznik) has been captured and broken behind enemy lines, making his recovery essential, as he may have spilled international secrets that could destroy diplomatic channels. As the team endeavors to bring Coyote back, writers Jez Butterworth and John-Henry Butterworth (who won a Tony for Jerusalem and scripted Ford V Ferrari) deftly play with POV, often leaving us as in the dark about Coyote’s location and predicament as the spies working to retrieve him. They’ve also played with Martian’s increasing internal conflict, as seen in the most recent episode, in which the viewer shares Henry’s concern that one of his best agents may not be emotionally or mentally fit for the assignment. 

If Coyote’s fate portends a potential future for any spy with an Achilles’ heel, the tale of Danny Morata (American Primeval’s Saura Lightfoot-Leon) reminds us that agents like Martian have an origin story, too. A relatively new operative, the Agency assigns her an undercover identity as a geophysics expert in order to get her into Tehran and close to that country’s nuclear program. To find the perfect cover to learn Iranian intelligence, she must get close to a seismology professor to qualify for travel to the country. Most writers wouldn’t spend nearly the time that the Butterworths do on Danny’s arc, as it often doesn’t seem directly tied to that of Martian, outside of both agents having the same handler in Naomi (Katherine Waterston). Instead, they trust that their viewers will have the patience to connect the dots from Danny to Coyote to Martian and how they are all a part of a broken system that tears down personalities to replace them with agendas. One is building a persona; one is suffering the fallout of the destruction of his; one is facing the repercussions of living a dual existence.

When asked why she’s interested in the field of seismology in the penultimate episode of the first season, Danny says she’s drawn to “small physical events built up over eons suddenly erupting in unimaginable violence.” Director Neil Burger and his team immediately cut to Martian as he attempts an off-book retrieval of Sami from the man who has discovered the true identity of Paul Lewis. Danny is speaking about espionage as much as earthquakes. It’s a show about years of political decisions building up over eons until they erupt onto actual people in the field.

The world of undercover agents and international intrigue feels like it’s near an oversaturation point in the pop-culture marketplace. Shows like Slow Horses, The Recruit, The Night Agent, and even Mr. & Mrs. Smith play with the mental, physical, and emotional tolls of what it means to ask people to leave everything behind to achieve alleged acts of heroism. What distinguishes The Agency from those series is its unapologetically complex viewpoint, which intertwines emotional arcs with detailed, multi-character plotting and has faith in people to understand how one shapes the other without spelling it out. Hollywood has produced dozens of tales of spies who lost themselves to get the job done (or failed to do so), but the true human cost of espionage has rarely been captured with this level of nuance. The spy doesn’t come in from the cold anymore. There’s nowhere warm to go.