Summary
The Asset offers nothing new, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing when it delivers tension so capably across six tight episodes.
As someone who watches a lot of film and TV, I’ve always been fascinated by the idea of undercover work. What I’m primarily interested in is why anyone would ever do it. I don’t recall a single instance of it ever having gone well on-screen. There are shows like The Agency that exist purely to imply deep-cover field work turns people into psychos. And Netflix’s The Asset, a taut Danish thriller that moves like lightning and lives in the morally and literally grey spaces Nordic Noir tends to monopolise, doesn’t do anything to convince me that going undercover isn’t a deeply terrible idea.
This is at the best of times, but The Asset is a show about the worst of times pretty much across the board. Nobody in it seems happy, or to be living a nice life, even the drug-peddling capo character and his luxury-loving girlfriend. Everyone is deeply miserable, and it’s obvious from the cold open of the first episode, which depicts an undercover agent on a plane being poisoned by the punctured bags of narcotics in his stomach, that this isn’t a show that’s going to get more jovial as it goes.
The undercover agent is Tea (Clara Dessau), a recovering addict from a tough background – alcoholic mother, abusive drug dealer ex-boyfriend, you get the idea – who is trying to better herself by joining the police force. But her career is waylaid by the PET – Denmark’s Security and Intelligence Service – who wants to use her as an undercover asset to help unseat a dangerous criminal named Miran (Afshin Firouzi). This means getting close to Miran’s girlfriend, Ashley (Maria Cordsen). But it also means upending her entire life and slipping back into the deepest, darkest corners of society she thought she’d left behind.
So far, so familiar. And really, that’s a problem that tends to blight The Asset through all six of its zippy episodes, since these are very familiar dramatic waters that yield few genuine surprises. There are twists and turns in the narrative, of course, and a few sequences of sustained tension or explosions of violence that justify the cost of entry alone, but you’re not going to see anything here that you haven’t already seen before.
But so what? This isn’t just a question I’m raising, but one that the show itself seems to offer up. Why do something totally new and risky when you can do something that has already proven to work, and do it really well? This isn’t a half-hearted rip-off of better shows, but a concerted effort to create a new entry in a storied canon, with extremely game performances and a real appreciation for how much tension lives in the duality of undercover work; that push-pull between fact and fiction as identities start to bleed together.
Clara Dessau embodies this really well. But there’s nuance everywhere. Miran, who is no doubt a criminal and, it later emerges, an outright abuser, nonetheless feels hemmed in by affection for his little brother, Bambi (Arian Kashef), and the daughter he shares with Ashley, if not necessarily Ashley herself. Bambi is a complex figure stuck in a prison of someone else’s making, a perpetual pain point that can be targeted to manipulate Miran, who loves him too much to get rid of him. And Tea’s handlers, Folke (Nicolas Bro), Yasin (Soheil Bavi), and Jensen (Klaus Tange), seem all too willing to risk Tea’s safety as long as she continues to get results. Their efforts to take down a bad guy don’t absolve them of the bad things they’re willing to do – or compel someone else to do – in order to make them happen.
The Asset’s creator, Adam August, loves wallowing in these murky spaces between right and wrong, hero and villain, and episode director Kasper Barfoed, late of La Palma and Chestnut Man, both also streaming on Netflix, knows to highlight the contradictions and idiosyncrasies at every opportunity. This is workmanlike entertainment in some respects, familiar in its genre and its presentation, but it’s also a very slick and sharp version of a proven formula. Discerning connoisseurs of Netflix’s Nordic thumbnails will love it, I feel sure, and with a concerted marketing push, it’s the kind of thing that might leap the transom into the mainstream and become a Top 10 hit. Time will tell.
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