The Premiere of ‘The Agency’ Is Painfully Dull

I love a spy drama, and there’s room for all kinds of different ones. But The Agency debuts in a post-Slow Horses streaming climate where the market is thick with competition and appetites are shifting. As of Episodes 1 and 2, which debuted together on Paramount+ With Showtime in a one-two punch of showy but cliché-ridden mediocrity, this show commits the worst sin a would-be competitor to the Slough House crown possibly could – it’s boring.

That’s something which, unfortunately, all the stars in the world can’t remedy – which is a shame, since The Agency can’t move for big names. Michael Fassbender plays the lead, Jeffrey Wright, Richard Gere, Katherine Waterston, and Jodie Turner-Smith (seen in Apple TV+’s Bad Monkey) are in it, Jez and John-Henry Butterworth wrote it, and Joe Wright directed the first couple of episodes. It’s like a who’s-who of serious creative talent.

But why should we care? The first two episodes are bland, laden with cliches, and almost deliberately inconsistent, building intrigue by flopping all over the place and refusing to reveal key details (similar to how Before completely turned off its audience by getting too cute for its own good) while relying on the terrific visuals and performances to carry the drama. Now, I’ll be the first to admit that beyond the opening two-parter, things might cohere and improve. But I can only review what’s in front of me.

For instance, let me recount some plot particulars and you’ll see what I mean. On the one hand, we’ve got Fassbender, who’s playing “Martian”, a deep-cover agent who has been embedded in Ethiopia for the last six years and is very abruptly pulled from the assignment and returned to London, meaning he has to up and leave the married woman, Sami Zahir (Turner-Smith), who he’s been having a sincere-seeming relationship with.

This alone has plenty of meat on the bone, raising the obvious question of whether Martian has abandoned the agency for Sami, or has abandoned Sami for the agency. But this is mostly background since the titular Agency has another problem that Martian can be of help with. A similar deep-cover agent has gone missing from Ukraine and nobody knows why. Higher-ups Bosko (Gere) and Henry (Wright) want him found ASAP since it turns out he is a recovering alcoholic and might be inclined to spill whatever secrets he knows. His past and present handlers, Blair (Ambreen Razia) and Owen (John Margaro), are brought in to help, both clearly bristling with the possibility of being somehow responsible for whatever happened to him – and what it might mean for global peace.

In the midst of this, Martian is trying to reacclimate to his old life, including repairing the testy relationship with his teenage daughter Poppy (India Fowler) that his long absences have damaged. But he’s finding it difficult to do that because his London apartment is bugged and he’s being constantly followed. When Rachel Blake, a doctor from Langley sent to evaluate the CIA’s approach to mental health arrives, Martian assumes her job is to specifically check up on him.

Oh, and Martian is also tasked with training up a raw recruit named Danny (Saura Lightfoot-Leon), who’s about to go on her first mission.

Michael Fassbender in The Agency | Image via Paramount+

Episodes 1 and 2 of The Agency total about two hours, which is nowhere near enough to handle all of this plot. The result is artless exposition in uncomfortable droves and that aforementioned sense of whiplash as we ping-pong between perspectives and narrative tracts. It’s an espionage thriller, so it stands to reason that nobody can be trusted, but the hook here is that there’s a large chance half the cast aren’t even sane. The missing agent, Coyote (Alex Reznik), serves as a cautionary tale about how a few lazy decisions and personal favors can entrust state secrets to an already-compromised individual and then thrust him into a scenario that it is impossible to emerge from without serious mental trauma. See also: Martian himself. That’s the idea, anyway.

I’m largely parsing this out, which I found myself doing a lot during the first couple of episodes, and I think it’s intentional. There’s a car chase in the first and a shootout in the second, but even those standard fixtures of the genre tend to be filmed for maximum disorientation and framed largely in the perspective of the people trying to make sense of it. The sensory overload might be closer to reality, but it isn’t especially enjoyable in a TV show.

This is perhaps why The Agency feels a bit like homework. An audience doesn’t need everything spelled out for them, but I don’t think they should be tasked with figuring out everything on their own either. Having to carefully analyze every character and relationship for clues about their history and function gets a bit wearing, especially since Episode 2 wants to sideline it all for a breathless on-mission hour that stands in weirdly stark opposition to the more cautious and mysterious Episode 1. This isn’t build-up and payoff; it’s like two episodes from completely different shows.

I’m hoping things will improve, or at least coalesce properly, but I’m doubtful. The Agency smacks of the kind of show that’s a little too impressed with itself to worry about small matters like whether its audience enjoys it or not. I guess we’ll have to see.