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.
