The Agency

The Agency is the English-language adaptation of Le Bureau des Légendes, the award-winning French series about undercover intelligence work, reworked for Paramount+ with Showtime by brothers Jez Butterworth and John-Henry Butterworth. At its center is Martian, a CIA officer played by Michael Fassbender, recalled to London after years living under a false identity in Africa and forced to readjust to an ordinary life just as the woman he once left behind, played by Jodie Turner-Smith, resurfaces. The show balances field missions, rendered with a tradecraft-focused attention to detail that owes a clear debt to its French source, with the internal politics of the agency's London station, a bureaucratic and competitive workplace not unlike an ordinary office, except that every mistake can cost lives.

Jeffrey Wright, as the station chief, delivers one of the series' most textured performances, while the rest of the cast, including Richard Gere, who joined the story in season two, contributes to an ensemble portrait of contemporary intelligence work that steers well clear of the genre's usual action-hero clichés. The show's core strength lies in treating espionage as a job made up of waiting, everyday lies and psychological wear that inevitably spills over into agents' private lives, rather than as a string of flashy missions. Season two picks up with Martian shaken by betrayal and a compromised operation, while Samia is held as a political prisoner in Sudan, a situation that pushes him to operate at the edges of the agency's rules in an attempt to save her, raising the emotional stakes beyond the first season.

That ability to hold geopolitical tension and understated romantic drama together, without ever tipping into melodrama, is what sets The Agency apart from other titles in the genre, and it's what made the show one of the most-watched series premieres in the network's history, a success confirmed and expanded with the release of its second season this year.