This article is taken from the February 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.
Amongst aficionados of television spy series, The Bureau, or Le Bureau des Légendes in the original French, is generally agreed to be the gold standard of modern espionage dramas. I reviewed it in 2020, describing it as “utterly absorbing”. The series follows a group of officers in the DGSE, the French foreign intelligence service, and it was made with the agency’s cooperation. The Bureau, I wrote, was made with an expectation that viewers will have an attention span and “intelligent curiosity about the world” — making it impressively authentic and complex.
Naturally, after all the critical acclaim, Hollywood wanted a piece of the action. So now we have The Agency, the remake, or perhaps “re-imagining” is a better word, co-produced by George Clooney.
New versions of old classics are quite the rage at the moment — as evinced by the engaging television series of The Day of the Jackal, Frederick Forsyth’s classic 1971 thriller. It’s a curious experience sitting back and sliding into The Agency, now showing on Paramount+. Plot points and storylines echo and overlap, bringing a comforting familiarity, but then veer off on a different creative tangent. Characters are similar then suddenly different. It’s like being at a party with people you think you know — who then turn out to be someone else. But overall, the series works.
The first change is the setting. The Agency is thoroughly American. The central dramatic arena has shifted from the DGSE headquarters in Paris to the CIA London station, based at the US embassy in Nine Elms. Michael Fassbender plays a deep-cover agent with the codename “Martian”, who after six years in Addis Ababa is suddenly recalled to London. Martian is very unhappy about this, especially as he is having a passionate affair with Samia, a Sudanese academic, regally and wonderfully played by Jodie-Turner Smith. Her colour-coordinated outfits are stunning — top marks to the costume supremo. Fassbender though delivers a quiet, sometimes oddly downbeat performance, interspersed with flashes of temper. Once back in London, he is followed everywhere by other CIA operatives. His new flat is bugged, all for his own protection, he is told. There is a bit too much of him moodily standing on the balcony and looking out over London.
Naturally, he rebels. Especially when Samia turns up in London, claiming to be attending an academic conference. They are soon having a passionate reunion in a hotel room. But can she really be trusted? The real reason she is in London is because Sudan is about to be sliced up like a salami at a secret conference and handed over to China.
The Agency has multiple storylines, all of which keep looping back to the London CIA station. The drama moves to Belarus then Ukraine, where several CIA operatives are stuck in Russian territory and have to shoot their way to freedom.
The deadly tension, heavy menace of war and its dreadful human cost are convincingly portrayed in some nail-biting action scenes. This is a big-budget series, but the money has been well spent on lavish locations.
Meanwhile Coyote, one of the CIA assets in Belarus, panics and flees to Poland. Fearing that he is actually a double agent, he is promptly renditioned by CIA operatives, pretending to be Russian. The aim is to find out if he is also working for Moscow. Things get very rough indeed for Coyote, especially when he starts spilling Russian contact names.
But are they real? Maybe he is just pretending to be a Russian agent because he believes he is being held by Russians. In the hall of mirrors that is intelligence work, truth and reality fade, flicker then shine again. One constant is Richard Gere giving a measured but pleasingly convincing performance as Bosko, the CIA head of station. I’m four episodes in so far, and will definitely be watching until the end.
Dark Rivers, showing on channel 4’s Walter Presents, had been on my radar for a while when a reader wrote to me, recommending that I consider it for review. It was fine advice.
This is a first-class drama, less ambitious than The Agency in its reach, but equally engrossing. The series unfolds in Passau, southern Germany, where the Danube meets the Inn and the Ilz.
Passau is a quiet, even smug historic city of quaint cobbled streets and squares, narrow alleys, cafés and cake shops. Its stolid Bavarian Catholicism is a very different world from gritty Berlin, Frederike Bader’s hometown. Ex-police officer Frederike and her daughter Mia are in Passau in witness protection, after Frederike testified against Ahmed Badari, a clan chief and organised crime boss.
It’s a depressing life — cut off from family and friends. Frederike, energetically played by Marie Leuenberger, has a dull job in a steel plant. Nadja Sabersky gives a fine performance as sulky teenager Mia, bored and working in a cake shop.
They are, however, safe. Until Frederike, who’s forgotten none of her fighting skills, takes down a shoplifter in a supermarket and trusses him up like a chicken. The incident is filmed and makes the local newspaper. Frederike’s cover starts to steadily unravel. So much so that Badari dispatches a relative to kill her and Mia. That murder attempt fails, but they are now in grave danger.
There’s an imaginative storyline that loops back to the Roman era and pleasingly, each of the four episodes is an hour and a half long. Dark Rivers is a fine choice for the last of the long and cold winter nights.
