The trailer for Showtime/Paramount+’s new spy show The Agency drops us in the deep end right away—with Michael Fassbender’s CIA operative in an interrogation room, surrounded by one-way mirrors reflecting him into infinity, facing off across a table from the great Harriet Sansom Harris, and giving her nothing.
“What’s your question, doctor?” he asks.
“You think it’s possible,” Harris replies, “that you may have something to hide?”
Um, yeah—it’s pretty possible. We’re talking, after all, about a character played by Michael Fassbender, who has worked all over the bastard-to-good-guy spectrum but is probably still best known for playing people with a whole lot to hide: androids with ulterior motives, secret sex addicts, international assassins posing as mild-mannered protein-maxing business travellers, and British commandos posing as Nazi officers.
But in this character’s case, dissembling is all in a day’s work. Over a quick-cut montage of 21st-century cloak-and-dagger action precision-edited to spark whatever lobe of the human brain responds to images of cold-eyed men moving through foreign airports with grim resolve and dispatching their amoral duties with brutal efficiency, Fassbender lays out the nature of the gig and the mental toll it extracts from those who take it on:
“Lie to everyone…Risk your life on a daily basis. No glamour. No exploding watch. I believe there’s one type of agent: The insane.”
In other words: James Bond is not walking through that door. And if he did, in this show, he’d probably be a high-functioning sociopath.
Executive-produced by George Clooney and Grant Heslov through their Smokehouse Pictures shingle, The Agency reimagines an acclaimed French series, Le Bureau des Légendes, which starred Mathieu Kassovitz as a spy who gets called back to France after six years undercover in Syria—and makes the fateful decision to reactivate his old covert-ops identity when a woman he had an affair with in Damascus shows up in Paris. Le Figaro called the series, inspired by real stories from real ex-spies, “the best ever made in France”; back in 2021, GQ’s own Chris Cohen said it does for post-War on Terror espionage dramas “what The Wire did for the cop show.” And just last week in our How To Watch TV package, Industry co-creator Konrad Kay gave it his highest recommendation as well. (You can rent all five seasons on Amazon as we speak.)
