The Agency (2024)

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.