The Agency Season 2 Blows Other Spy Shows Out Of The Water
Neither self-referential nor cliché, The Agency continues to channel the John le Carré spirit, with modern binge-worthy propulsion.
There’s a great line toward the end of John le Carré’s The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, in which a slow-burning double cross is explained like this: “And suddenly, with terrible clarity of a man too long deceived, Leamas understood the whole ghastly trick.” There’s not really a comparable character to le Carré’s titular spy in the spy drama The Agency, but this line perfectly describes all the best moments in the show, especially in the impending second season. Debuting in late 2024, The Agency Season 1 was a slow-burning spy drama that took the best of prestige TV and combined it with the spirit of le Carré, and a touch of something else: A deeply human workplace drama. In Season 2, The Agency is not only better than ever, but it also makes a lot of other spy dramas look juvenile. And that’s because this show turns the mundane amazing and the amazing commonplace.
Some of the best scenes in The Agency involve people bringing important file folders to other people, or standing outside of office doors demanding to be let in, or, even better, my favorite trope in the show: when someone goes to leave an office, then hesitates, and says something awesome, and plot-alerting, right before walking out. The Agency is empowering, because if you’ve ever worked at an office, it transforms that humdrum world of reports and swipe cards and lanyards into a battlefield. Is this realistic in terms of how the London branch of the CIA actually works? I don’t care, because the office drama of the show creates enough verisimilitude to make me feel like I could be a spy, too.
Here’s a strange, but timely parallel: The new James Bond game, First Light, pulls an interesting trick, which could be a clever way for young people (read: twentysomethings) to imagine becoming a recruit into a kind of small fraternity of state-funded assassins. In First Light, the player is a 26-year-old James Bond, who is not a spy at first, but some inexperienced guy who falls out of a helicopter and has to figure out how to survive. Early levels have Bond navigating the subtleties of a dance club and also learning to drive certain kinds of cars, sort of like an adventure version of high school and college. The Agency is basically the grown-up version of the same kind of wish-fulfillment. In The Agency, you’ve learned how to drive, shoot, party, and sleep around. Now you’re just trying to get through your day, keep your job, and not blow your cover.
If you need proof that The Agency is a show about grown-ups doing grown-up spy work, the cast says it all: This is a who’s who of incredible talents, from Katherine Waterson’s relatable and clear-eyed Naomi; to Richard Gere’s grumpy Bosko; to Jeffrey Wright’s indomitable Henry, the CIA boss who is seemingly the only honest guy in the world. Throw in the dad from Paddington, Hugh Bonneville, as an antagonistic MI6 higher-up, and you’ve got an incredible show about extremely realistic spies and the people who love and hate them. While it’s true there are some younger characters in the mix, including the supremely likable Daniela (Saura Lightfoot-Leon), codename “Gremlin,” The Agency often feels so grounded and realistic because the people you’re looking at, even if they are famous movie stars, are (mainly) all of a generation who remember when social media didn’t exist.
Richard Gere as Bosko, Jeffrey Wright as Henry, and Michael Fassbender as Martian, the elder statesmen of The Agency.
This isn’t to say The Agency is some kind of referendum on hot, young shows for cool kids. It’s simply to say that at its core, it's an adult show about spies that doesn’t wink or nudge or mock or subvert the genre. Some might say Slow Horses is more fun, but it’s certainly not more believable. And, if you put The Agency Season 2 next to other more recent spy shows like Black Doves or Lioness, this one wins on nearly every single metric. The characters are extremely well drawn, the twists are awesome, but crucially, the mysteries of the show are knowable. The Agency might be dense, but it’s not confusing on purpose, nor is it does it have people act out of character for the shock value. Like Season 1, every single episode of The Agency Season 2 is written by creators Jez Butterworth and John-Henry Butterworth, and the consistency of their writing is apparent throughout. You never feel like you’re watching a show where some small plot detail was farmed out, or there’s a loose end lost in a vast writers’ wroom. The entire season is as tight as a very long feature film. And the show-stopping finale delivers on every promise the season secretly made all along.
As with Season 1, the heart of the show is the agent known as Martian, as played with steely danger from Michael Fassbender, who is trying so hard not to be charming that he’s charming as hell. His one true love, the embattled Dr. Sami Zahir (Jodie Turner-Smith), has to grapple with the fallout of everything that happened between her and Martian in Season 1, but, oddly, the only thing a new viewer needs to know about The Agency Season 2 is that Martian really, really loves Sami and will do anything to secure her safety. This is actually the brilliance of The Agency Season 2, it doesn’t create a barrier to entry with a bunch of complex spy plots from the previous season but instead, builds a bridge with excellent character motivations.
John Magaro as Owen and Ambreen Razia as Blair, one of the show’s brighter spots.
In fact, the characters are all so likable and so damn interesting that at times you may forget to pay attention to the spy stuff. In addition to Lightfoot-Leon’s Gremlin, the other big shout-outs on this front are John Magaro as Owen, the aimable office stiff-turned-CIA-field-agent, and Ambreen Razia as Blair, the stoic CIA case worker who, along with Owen, delivers some of the best scenes in the season.
There’s more to it all, of course: A terror cell that is backed by an ex-US military dude. Martian’s complex plan to get Sami to safety. An eye-opening storyline about Gremlin getting close to an unpredictable Iranian named Hassan (Keanush Tafreshi). All of these storylines are compelling, but the true magic of The Agency is that sometimes you forget that the spy stuff matters at all. Seeing how the trick is done in The Agency isn’t ghastly at all, but instead, highly entertaining and surprisingly heartfelt.
