Michael Fassbender and Richard Gere, top-notch spies in the series 'The agency'

Spies, undercover agents and hired killers are gaining ground in prestigious television fiction. A few weeks ago, the series landed on Netflix Black doves, with Keira Knightley ready to show her most violent side. With a fifth installment already announced on Apple TV+, Slow horses has become a cult series in a landscape where it is increasingly difficult for a title to gain loyal followers. And now it is coming to SkyShowtime The Agency, the American remake of The Bureau, by Frenchman Éric Rochand. The adaptation is by British playwright Jez Butterworth —whose work we have seen here the splendid Jerusalem by Pere Arquillué—, and his brother John-Henry, with whom he had already signed the scripts for films such as Ford v Ferrari and Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny. On his own, Jez also collaborated on the writing of one of the last James Bond adventures, Spectro (2015), so this isn't the first time they've ventured into spy fiction.

But The Agency The series moves away from the spectacle and glamour of 007 to bring the tradition of the works of John le Carré or Graham Greene into the present day. The series follows the return of Martian (Michael Fassbender) to CIA headquarters in London. He is an agent who has spent the last few years living in Africa under a false identity as an English teacher. In the British capital, he finds himself faced with an open crisis in the agency due to a possible double agent in Belarus. The series traces the tactical movements of the CIA on the chessboard of contemporary geopolitics, through a series of moves that are not always entirely clear. But Martian is touched by the human factor, like the protagonist of Greene's novel of the same name. He too fell in love during his stay in Sudan with a teacher and human rights activist, Samia (Jodie Turner-Smith), whom he meets again in London.

The series combines the tension of the spy plot with the dramatic conflict of checking to what extent Martian's passion will affect his work. Fassbender portrays this spy with total control over his actions, who, however, does not give up on the woman he loves. The CIA is also aware of the human dimension of its workers. As soon as he arrives in London, the agency assigns two men to follow the protagonist. And they force him to visit a psychiatrist. Six years of pretending to be someone else, alone and on another continent can affect the mental stability of the most upright man.

The screenwriters are not the only prestigious names in The Agency, co-produced by George Clooney. Fassbender is joined by a more convincing Richard Gere than in many of his romantic roles, as the main people in the London office, and Jeffrey Wright, a regular in Wes Anderson's films. The first two episodes are directed by Joe Wright, known for the films Pride and Prejudice and Atonement, which lends a restrained elegance to the series' visual style. His touch is evident in the recurrent use of mirrors and reflections that underline the unstable condition of the characters' identities, and in the way he introduces contemporary London architecture, especially the brutalist beauty of the apartment in the Barbican building where Martian is staying. The slow-burning and sometimes somewhat hermetic pace of the ten episodes of The Agency may scare audiences more accustomed to hyperactive and over-explained plots. This is a fiction to be enjoyed slowly and without missing a detail.