What a time it is to be a fan of spy shows. Slow Horses has just ended, there is a new remake of The Day of the Jackal, and we are only a few days away from seeing Keira Knightley’s wildly anticipated new Netflix show Black Doves. Even to think about entering a market this crowded, you would have to have wild levels of confidence.
Which brings us to The Agency, a new Paramount+ spy show that could measure its confidence in light years. It is based on the French series Le Bureau des Légendes, a show that has been acclaimed as one of the best ever made. It has been adapted by the Butterworth brothers, who seem to do nothing except make hits. It is produced by George Clooney. The first two episodes are directed by Joe Wright. The cast features Michael Fassbender, Jodie Turner-Smith, Jeffrey Wright and Richard Gere. Paramount is promoting it less like a television programme and more like the second coming of Christ. What could possibly go wrong?
As it turns out, a lot. On the basis of the first couple of episodes, it feels as if The Agency spent so much time amassing a murderers’ row of prestigious names that it forgot to put any petrol in the tank. This is a slow, ambling show that, at times, feels as if it is collapsing under the weight of its own self-importance. Perhaps, like Le Bureau des Légendes, we will be able to look back at it five years from now and marvel at its mastery of slowly tightening its grip on the audience. But as a way of introducing itself, The Agency moves with all the urgency of the recently tranquillised.
Fassbender is the object around which all else orbits. He has been out of action for a while, popping up only in the slated Taika Waititi film Next Goal Wins and David Fincher’s comprehensively unheralded The Killer. In The Agency, he plays an American spy who is brought back from a long-term undercover operation less cleanly than his superiors would have liked. He went abroad, fell in love, and failed to cut all contact with the object of his affection. Is that because love conquers all, or because the woman has a dark, ulterior motive? Presumably, at this rate, we will find out, seven or eight years from now.
There is a sliver of good news. The fact that Le Bureau des Légendes ran for so long means that, should it be recommissioned, The Agency is in good hands. It won’t, to use a professional industry term, do a Homeland and go bananas the second it runs out of source material. The time will not come where Fassbender outlives his French counterpart and, stuck for what else to do with him, the showrunners decide to get him hooked on heroin in an Argentinian tower block. This, if nothing else, is worth clinging to.
The larger thing hobbling The Agency is the fact that we are living in a post-Slow Horses world. Slow Horses is effortless. It seems to know the town in which it is set. It understands how to lighten the moment with a joke. It is built from the inside out, with characters driving the plot rather than the other way around. And it is staggering how much The Agency forgets to do any of this.
Like Slow Horses, it is also set in London. But it is an incurious, touristy version of London that lacks authenticity. And unlike in Slow Horses, nobody here has any discernible personality. This goes double for Fassbender’s character.
Also – and I’m aware this is a small thing in the bigger scheme of things – I am still not fully sure where his character is supposed to be from. I would like to hazard a guess that he is American. But then again, he is an Irish actor playing a character who lives in London, and his accent reflects this, at differing levels, from scene to scene. It is bizarre.
Maybe these are early wobbles. Maybe in the future, The Agency will find its feet and start grabbing its source material by the throat. When it does, there is a good chance that it will be brilliant. But someone wake me up when it happens, please, because who has time?
• The Agency is on Paramount+ now.
