The Agency (2024)

Good, smart, propulsive spy thriller.

The more episodes I watched, the more I started to grasp and comprehend the show’s pace and framework and came to appreciate its intentionality. This is a world I want to understand because it feels like I’m watching an intricate puzzle being put together. It’s a unique world I enjoy being in so I’m looking forward to seeing where The Agency goes after a strong start.

I’ve never worked for a foreign intelligence service (I would say that, wouldn’t I?) but it certainly feels authentic and, more importantly, it’s a chilly, complex, utterly engrossing drama that unfolds in unexpected ways.

Paramount+ and Showtime's "The Agency" doesn't have the spy action that fans of "Mission: Impossible" or James Bond may expect, but I found the two episodes sent to press consistently riveting due to the sharp dialogue, incredible ensemble, and tight filmmaking.

Deeply engrossing (in the three episodes made available to critics), the espionage thriller explores the human cost of covert work.

It plays an intricate and involving game of cat and mouse—and presents a layered portrait of espionage as an act of performance—with dispassionate precision.

Only four of the season’s 10 episodes were made available to critics, so this comes with a heavy caveat — a story can start out well enough and then struggle to live up to its ambitions — but I like what I’ve seen so far, with its world of operatives and handlers, of covert glances and back-channel subterfuge, laid out with a seductive urgency that gives a deceptively graceful quality to all this unseemly work.

Fassbender’s mesmerizing performance is the biggest draw here, giving viewers a real taste of what it’s like to love a liar. .... Other story lines for secondary and tertiary characters feel comparatively unmoored. But on the whole, it’s all very slick and overtly, pleasingly fancy-schmancy.

The forbidden relationship between our spy and his paramour is missing the actual chemistry required to undergird so much of what is sure to come in The Agency. .... This would be a totally good show to watch with relatives. It’s smart, it moves, it’s got great people in it. You may need to pause and explain things—like when the show suddenly takes us to Ukraine or Belarus—to your aged uncle. But you’ll enjoy it. And then, when you have a chance for some temps seul, do try Le Bureau.

Stylish and solidly built, “The Agency” is genre-fare elevated by its impressive cast and polished presentation. If you don’t mind a committed cover song — and aren’t too attached to whatever echoes from the past this version brings up — then you might just get hooked all over again. Hooked enough, anyway.

The feature film-level aesthetics are impressive, but the multiple storylines are sluggish and in some cases difficult to follow.

Is deadly serious in its chilly depiction of a spy who's come in from the cold too suddenly. [9 - 29 Dec 2024, p.4]

Like we said, the cast of The Agency carries the show, but we’re not sure how much the stories will hold viewer interest unless they quickly get more interesting.

If Fassbender is watchable, Turner-Smith is the opposite. Her character is mysterious – we’re supposed to wonder if she is also a spy – but she conveys this in a frustratingly one-note way. The Agency gives us much to think about, but there are too many unwelcome distractions.

Directed in its initial installments by Joe Wright, the series looks terrific and sometimes builds suspense. What it doesn’t have, at least in early episodes, is much consistency. Each of the three chapters sent to critics has a different set of attributes and different points of frustration, which in turn add up to an overall frustration.

The script is smart, if not exactly sharp. There’s occasional humor. .... Of the large cast, Jeffrey Wright stands out. .... He [Michael Fassbender] fails to ignite the necessary chemistry with Sami, despite obligatory explicit sex scenes.

Despite some promising concepts and a committed cast, The Agency squanders its potential with slow pacing and a conflicted tone that seems to be at battle with itself. It never knows whether it wants to be popcorn entertainment or something more thought-provoking and vulnerable.

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.

The series has the strange quality of being under- and overwritten; people don’t talk much, and when they do, they don’t necessarily talk like people. .... One assumes — hopes, anyway — that something compelling is going to happen in those remaining seven hours, but the direction is so thick with style and the characters so little developed, that it’s hard to work up more than a cursory interest in anyone’s fate.

There's an interesting idea here about struggling to live in the skin of another and how easy it is to lose yourself in work, but what the show ends up losing is our interest instead.