Clarisse Loughrey’s Show of the Week column, published every Friday, spotlights a new show to watch or skip. This week: The Agency examines “what it costs a human being to abandon their identity.”
While watching live footage of a man tortured at the CIA’s behest, an agent absentmindedly starts to hum. Someone had mentioned Bruce Springsteen. Now she has Dancing in the Dark stuck in her head. It comes across as sociopathic. It probably is sociopathic. But that’s normal for the world of Showtime’s The Agency, which remakes the 2015 French spy series Le Bureau des Legendes, itself based on real accounts by former spies.
The Agency has little interest in the mechanics of missions or even the CIA’s larger political aims—at least, that’s true of the first two episodes provided to critics. Instead, this is about what’s inside a spy’s brain, and how the intentional, methodical sanding down of their humanity leaves them to be what, exactly? A zombified soldier? A weapon crafted from flesh?
It’s not exactly the freshest territory. But that’s near-impossible now that there are so many big-budget, A-lister-fronted spy shows that real skill is required even to keep track of which actor is in what, on which streaming service. Thankfully, The Agency is different enough that it stands out. It’s a little more elegant than might be expected. More cerebral. Richard Gere’s in it.
It will, however, be fighting tooth and nail against Sky’s competing The Day of the Jackal, which is still mid-season. Both have been compared in reviews to David Fincher’s (severely undervalued) hitman film The Killer—The Day of the Jackal because it seems as if Eddie Redmayne’s fastidious, cool-toned assassin may have been taking notes from Michael Fassbender’s performance in the film, The Agency because it stars actual Michael Fassbender.
It’s impressive how different Fassbender’s character actually reads to The Killer here, despite both being men who paint themselves as spectres in service entirely to their work, only to fail in quelling the inconvenience of human feeling. Neither of them even has a name (here, he’s just known as Martian). What separates Martian is that he doesn’t, on first meeting, come across as anyone out of the ordinary for this field. He wears his suits, walks with confidence, and has the slick charm of any television super spy.
But Fassbender makes sure that, if we catch him in the right light, he looks absolutely terrified. Martian has been pulled back from six years undercover in Ethiopia, arriving in London to a balloon-accompanied welcome home to the main office and a reunion with the daughter he left behind, Poppy (India Flower). But why is it that, the entire time he’s with Poppy, he can’t stop making jokes about killing her? And why is it when he finally meets his handler Naomi (the always excellent Katherine Waterston), she gives him an enormous grin that falls the second he pulls her in for a hug? Something here doesn’t quite feel like business as usual.
As Naomi so conveniently spells out in episode two, this is a series about “what it costs a human being to abandon their identity”. The narrative kickoff point involves, essentially, the revelation that this man is about to ruin his life for the sake of Jodie Turner-Smith. It’s possibly the most relatable thing I’ve ever seen in a spy series—the actor glides onto screen with such regal command that you worry she’ll steal the show away with her when she leaves. She plays the married Sami, a social anthropologist Martian meets while on a mission and who he was supposed to unceremoniously cut out of his life.
Yet, she won’t leave his mind. That dangerous word, “love”, starts to surface. It’s helpful, then, to have director Joe Wright at the helm of The Agency’s debut episodes, since so much of his career has been in service to beautiful, emotive romances like 2007’s Atonement and 2021’s Cyrano. He lends Jez Butterworth & John-Henry Butterworth’s slick, efficient scripts a sense of heightened style. A tracking shot over the top of a row of (occupied) toilet cubicles looks almost beautiful.
Fassbender’s co-stars are all uniformly up to the task: Jeffrey Wright, who does beleaguered so wonderfully, plays boss Henry; John Magaro makes for a nicely nervy handler, Owen; Saura Lightfoot-Leon feeds necessary hesitance into recruit Danny; and Gere barks furiously as the borderline abusive top dog Bosko. Now, is that enough to convince audiences The Agency is different from every other spy series?
