Fassbender, Wright and Gere Keep The Agency’s Slow Burn Worth Watching

The Agency Season 1 takes a few episodes to get moving, but this cast is good enough to carry you through the wait.

Look at the names on this show. Michael Fassbender, Jeffrey Wright, Richard Gere, Jodie Turner-Smith, Katherine Waterston and John Magaro all share the same London Station, and Hugh Bonneville and Dominic West turn up on top of that. Most spy shows would build a whole season around any one of them. The Agency, a remake of the French series Le Bureau des Légendes from Jez and John-Henry Butterworth, has so many that actors of this level end up doing their best work in glass-walled offices and whispered hallway conversations.

Fassbender Does More With Less

Fassbender plays Martian, a covert CIA officer ordered to drop his undercover life and come home to London Station. This is his first TV series since 2008, and it’s a smart fit for him. Martian spends every scene managing what other people get to see, and few actors are better at giving you nothing while letting you know something is going on underneath.

David Fincher got a similar kind of cold precision out of him in The Killer. The Agency adds a crack in the armor. Martian has been someone else for years, and now he has to act like a normal person around his teenage daughter Poppy (India Fowler) and a CIA psychologist who is paid to see through him. The scenes with Harriet Sansom Harris as Dr. Blake are some of my favorites of the season, two people in a room trying to out-read each other.

Wright and Gere Are the Real Reason to Watch

Give me an entire spinoff of Henry and Bosko talking in a room. Wright plays Henry, Martian’s mentor, and he has one of the best voices in the business for delivering bad news slowly. Wright has been doing the wise, weary intelligence man since he played Felix Leiter, and he has only gotten better at it. Henry always looks like he’s three moves ahead and tired of playing.

Gere is the casting surprise for me. Bosko, the London station chief, spent eight years undercover himself, and Gere plays him with an ease that makes everyone around him seem nervous. He doesn’t need to raise his voice. He sits back, smiles a little and lets the younger people talk themselves into trouble. It’s a great late-career role, and when Wright and Gere share a scene the show is at its peak, because the actors are having as much fun as the characters are having outmaneuvering Langley.

A Deep Bench

Turner-Smith has the hardest job in the cast as Dr. Samia Zahir, the woman from Martian’s undercover life who reappears in London. The romance drives the whole plot, so Sami needs to be more than a reason for Martian to make bad decisions, and Turner-Smith gives her enough intelligence and guardedness that you keep wondering what she really wants. The romance itself is the least interesting thing going on here, though, and the show comes alive more when people are lying for work than when they’re lying for each other.

Waterston and Magaro are the quiet MVPs. Waterston plays Naomi as a case officer with a real weight on her, and Magaro’s Owen, the guy who gets sent into Minsk whether he’s ready or not, brings the only regular dose of human fear to a building full of professionals who have trained it out of themselves. Saura Lightfoot-Leon has the toughest subplot as Danny, a young recruit being prepared for a mission that keeps pulling the show away from its strongest players. Her story can feel predictable, but she and Waterston make the mentor relationship work.

Then there’s Bonneville, who I never expected to find this unsettling. He plays Richardson with all the charm you know from Downton Abbey and Paddington, and that charm is exactly what makes him a threat. Dominic West barely has to do anything as the CIA director to make the room feel smaller.

The Slow Start

All that talent is why I’d tell you to stick around, because the early episodes ask for patience. The plot is dense, the spy jargon piles up fast, and the first stretch spends a lot of time setting pieces on the board. Joe Wright’s work on the opening episodes gives it a handsome, chilly look, but the show doesn’t hit its stride until around the middle of the season, when the threats to Martian and the people close to him become personal.

The Butterworths saved their best action for the end. The finale cashes in nine episodes of setup with real tension and leaves Martian in a very different position than I expected. If you skipped this one when it was on, all of Season 2 is already on Paramount+, so you can go straight from that ending into what comes next.

Fans of Slow Horses or Homeland will be right at home, as long as they’re willing to give it three or four episodes. If you need a set piece every hour, this one will test you.