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Francophiles, adventurous TV viewers, and those prone to scoffing at streamer algorithms may remember the first time they came across The Bureau, a drama set within the General Directorate for External Security (in French, the DGSE). Actor-director Matthieu Kassovitz played Guillaume Debailly — code name: Malotru — a spy who’d abruptly come in from the cold after a six-year undercover stint in Syria. He’s attempting to adjust to life out of the field and back in the office; like his mission, his romantic relationship with a history professor from Damascus has been terminated with extreme prejudice. His superior, his handler, and his office mates worry that he’s mentally unstable. The company therapist who he’s mandated to see frets over his distracted, hostile attitude. Debailly is a cypher to both the newbie agent he’s supposed to be mentoring for her upcoming undercover assignment in Iran and the teen daughter he hasn’t seen in ages. “So you’re like Jason Bourne?” she asks her dad. “Except I remember things,” he replies. That’s a joke. It’s also his very-much-real-life curse.
This exchange takes place in the first episode, and it’s the key to the contradictory nature of creator Éric Rochant’s extraordinary addition to the spy-vs-spy canon: Yes, this is an espionage thriller, complete with everything you’d expect out of the genre, from car chases to close calls to international intrigue. But it’s also not the sort of espionage thriller most modern audiences were weaned on. The muted tone — and emphasis on the toll such high-stakes deceit takes on those who practice it — was closer to John Le Carré than Bourne or James Bond, and the show traded in nonstop blockbuster-style mayhem for a cross between a workplace drama and the “difficult man” antihero stories of early Prestige TV. The Bureau‘s inaugural episodes colonized the middle ground between those two in a way that immediately made you lean in. We’d put the series’ second season up against any year of Breaking Bad. You can currently find Seasons One and Two available to rent on Apple TV, which is appropriate given that iTunes was the first place to make them available in the U.S. We recommend just purchasing the whole five-season run on DVD. Trust us on this.
Anyone who’s already seen Rochant’s world-class series will feel a strong sense of what the French call déjà vu when they start digging into The Agency, the Americanized remake of The Bureau that’s just passed the halfway mark of its first season on Showtime. (Or, if you’re watching it via streaming, on Paramount+ with Showtime … which we think is now also technically the name of the premium cable channel as well? Welcome to entertainment circa 2024-2025!) Starring Michael Fassbender as C.I.A. operative Brandon Cunningham — code name: Martian — this new show’s pilot replicates the French version’s first episode to an uncanny degree. Sequences are recreated with shot-for-shot fidelity. You wonder if the seriously pedigreed writers Jez and John-Henry Butterworth (Edge of Tomorrow, Ford v. Ferrari) didn’t adapt the original script so much as simply translate it into English. The new supporting cast even vaguely resembles their earlier Franco counterparts.
The story itself remains more or less the same as well, despite the location changes: Brandon/Martian is brought back in to the London office after a long undercover tenure in Ethiopia, where he’d been posing as a professor and writer named “Paul Lewis.” His romantic partner, Dr. Samia Zahir (Jodie Turner-Smith), is a married Sudanese archeologist and is just as saddened by Paul’s sudden departure as he is. His reintegration into “normal” life is happening at the exact same moment that another agent, code named “Coyote,” has mysteriously gone missing in Belarus. No one knows if he’s been abducted, recruited by a foreign intelligence agency, or murdered. But his disappearance essentially means that every other classified mission within the region is now in jeopardy and every other agent involved in said missions are at risk of having their cover blown. Martian has to find Coyote before several tons of shit hits a half dozen fans.
Orbiting around this central plot is a host of other storylines, some more peripheral than others. Brandon’s daughter, Poppy (India Fowler), attempts to get to know her long-absent dad. Brandon’s direct boss, Henry (Jeffrey Wright, killing it per usual), has a personal stake in one of the in-progress missions that’s in danger of falling apart, and his backchannel communications end up making things worse. Coyote’s case officer, Owen (John Magaro), leaves the office to follow some leads regarding the man’s whereabouts. Samia shows up in London, allegedly to attend a conference, and Brandon rekindles their clandestine romance despite her suspicious security detail (A Real Pain‘s Kurt Egyiawan) sniffing about. The company therapist (Harriet Sansom Harris) conducts sessions with Brandon and offers counsel regarding the search for Coyote. Chinese agents and a rogue Russian general also join in on the fun. Every so often, Richard Gere will show up to scream and belittle everyone during tense meetings in conference rooms.
(The big change here from the source material involves the subplot revolving around Danny, a younger female agent played by Saura Lightfoot-Leon who’s about to embark on her first big mission. Martian is initially recruited to train her, and The Agency repeats the same trial-by-fire first meeting between the two. In the remake, however, it’s Martian’s old, take-no-shit handler Naomi that then steps in to shape Danny as she preps for an undercover op in Iran. While this gives Katherine Waterston, who plays Naomi, more to do — always a good thing when you’re talking about an actor of her caliber — it makes this entire storyline feel superfluous and somewhat disconnected from the rest of the series. If you find yourself getting impatient to get back to the main event during these sections, you’re not the only one.)
It’s an impressive cover version. More importantly, however, is that The Agency doubles its European predecessor in the one way it needs to, and that’s in terms of pacing and mood. There are action sequences, including a harrowing escape of agents stationed in Ukraine, and Martian’s fight skills are eventually put to good use. But this is a show dedicated to the less glamorous, more labor-intensive side of the spy trade, which makes its workplace drama aspects feel familiar even when folks are fretting about international incidents; it’s a rare spy-thriller series that makes space for a middle manager to bitch and moan over the budget-exceeding price of extracting an agent from the field. This is a show that loves its shades of gray, whether you’re talking about visually or in terms of morality. Brandon and his cohorts are essentially white-collar espionage spooks, trafficking in all-in-a-day’s-work deceit punctuated by violence. Clocks get punched as much as enemies of the state.
It helps immensely, of course, that it has a lead actor that can make every aspect of Brandon’s dilemmas seem compelling — you hate to think of how this show would play without someone like Fassbender at the center of it. The standout sequence in the pilot isn’t in the original, in fact: It involves his character cranking up the stereo in his agency-assigned apartment and silently scouring the place for surveillance bugs. The star excels at this kind of show-don’t-tell, action-is-character stuff, especially if it involves both procedural-style process work and someone trying to tamp down on raging inner conflicts. There are times when you feel like he’s channeling his tormented antihero from Shame, other times when he’s tapping into his meticulous sociopath from The Killer, and still others when he’s managed to fuse both of those sides into one fucked-up difficult man. All of the supporting performances are equally solid, though we’d be remiss if we did not shout out Harris’ sui generis take on the psychiatric evaluator Dr. Blake; the Licorice Pizza actor adds shades to this version that ably allow her to step out of the shadow of The Bureau‘s head shrinker.
Is The Agency the best spy-thriller workplace drama on TV right now? In a world in which Slow Horses continues to drop new episodes, that answer is, alas, no. But it’s easily the most neurotic look at secret agents we’ve had in a long time. And six episodes in, it’s already earned the right to be seen as both a stellar English-language take on a French-TV landmark and a show written by adults, for adults, on a mash-up network now devoted to endless iterations of Dexter and Taylor Sheridan Westerns and neo-Westerns. You may remember that the American remake of The Office began life as a virtual carbon copy of the British sitcom, before deviating from the U.K. template and finding its own voice. While we’d love to see Fassbender and friends do their cover version of The Bureau‘s pitch-perfect Season Two — the show has already been renewed for a sophomore go, since its streaming debut apparently broke records — there’s the sense that, having sold this mercurial, morally ambiguous look at spies very much like us, it’s now ready to accept a mission completely of its own making, breaking from the mold and sticking to their own scripts.
