There’s a lot going on in Class of ’09, a new FX limited series about a group of FBI Academy graduates on divergent paths into a dystopian-ish future. It’s 2034, and the FBI director, Tayo Michaels (Brian Tyree Henry, elder age denoted by graying temples), oversees a vast, nebulous surveillance system indicated by flickering images and constellations of code, tentatively investigated by agents with bionic eyes and holographic screens. Then it’s 2009, when several recruits gather at Quantico for five months of formative training. In the present, the ’09 graduate Ashley Poet (Kate Mara) is an undercover agent tasked with snooping on her classmate Hour’s (Sepideh Moafi) dubiously ethical “criminal database”.
Each are intriguing threads of what could be compelling storylines: an elegiac glimpse of past camaraderie before life got heavy and complicated, a high-concept law enforcement procedural, a sci-fi lite thriller. But Class of ’09, written and created by the British novelist/screenwriter Tom Rob Smith and executive-produced by American Crime Story’s Nina Jacobson and Brad Simpson, seems more interested in the tricky arrangement of these threads than actually pursuing them.
