The Agency is a remake of Le Bureau des Légendes, the acclaimed French series about agents of France’s foreign-intelligence service, the D.G.S.E. Produced by George Clooney’s Smokehouse Pictures and with a script by the acclaimed Butterworth brothers (Ford v Ferrari, Edge of Tomorrow), it’s a 10-episode thriller that hopscotches from the C.I.A.’s London station to the badlands of Ethiopia, Belarus, and Iran. However, like the original, it’s also grounded in the paranoia, compromises, and drudgery that are the handmaidens of intelligence work.
The setup: a deep-cover agent neglects to tell his handler about the local woman he’s fallen in love with. That agent, code-named “Martian” (Michael Fassbender), is the gimlet-eyed protagonist of The Agency, who’s spent six years working undercover in Addis Ababa—and whom the C.I.A. has abruptly summoned to return home to London.
An otherwise scrupulous intelligence professional with a rigid fidelity to tradecraft, Martian can’t bring himself to give up the memory of Sami (Jodie Turner-Smith), the university professor whose bed he shared—at least not as easily as he surrenders his fake IDs and burner e-mail accounts to the C.I.A.’s keyboard warriors once he’s back in the fold.
Le Bureau received a standing ovation when it was screened for D.G.S.E. agents in France, and The Agency is a largely faithful adaptation, with its focus on the cynical realism of intelligence work. Spymasters matter-of-factly hash out the details of operations around conference-room tables that make the show feel, at times, like nothing more than a workplace drama, albeit with life-and-death stakes.
Such verisimilitude gained the approval of many real-life spies. “I think what made [Le Bureau] so good was that it did a great job with the office politics and the field-headquarters dynamic,” says former C.I.A. analyst David McCloskey. “Very few spy shows actually deal with the bureaucratic issues and dynamics or treat them seriously. Le Bureau, to its credit, did.”
By forgoing extensive gunplay and highly choreographed action scenes in favor of office tedium and psychological manipulation, Le Bureau’s creator, Eric Rochant, a devotee of the spy novels of John le Carré, aimed at something more realistic. As he told me in 2020, Le Bureau got enough details of spy work right that some D.G.S.E. agents encouraged their family members to watch it so they could understand their top-secret, if quotidian, work.
“TV and film don’t always allow for that,” says Christina Hillsberg, a former C.I.A. officer. “They want fast-paced, action-packed spy thrillers. This can be entertaining, but in reality, the best espionage operations take time, years even.”
Several members of The Agency’s cast were hooked on Le Bureau during its run from 2016 to 2020, when Le Figaro called it the best TV show ever made in France. For the pretend spies, as much as the real ones, it was the everyday themes of the series that piqued their interest. “I think it’s a very human experience to fall deeply in love with someone, and [it] not be convenient,” says Turner-Smith. Richard Gere, who plays Bosko, the chief of the London station, concurs: “The lying and mystery is really part of our daily life,” he says. “We are unknowable to each other.”
The Agency premieres on November 29 on Paramount+ with Showtime
Andy Meek is a Memphis-based journalist who covers media, entertainment, and culture
