From NOC debriefings to brutal field work, The Agency builds a smarter, darker second season that’s hard to turn off.
★★★★☆
Four out of five stars
If there’s one thing Hollywood gets more wrong than what ingredients are necessary for a good spy yarn (hint: it’s not stunts and sex scenes), it’s what makes a successful second act. Too often, a successful TV series’ second season — or a movie’s first sequel — goes off the rails with a phoned-in story and performances that are more of the same instead of further development of an already good story.
Thankfully, that’s not the case with The Agency, which just turned in a second act that’s stronger and much more compelling than its already solid freshman season. How much more compelling? While it took me a couple of weeks to watch the first season, I binge-watched season 2’s 10 episodes in three nights.
Even on nights when I needed to get to bed early, I’d stay up for “one more episode” because I had to find out what happened next. That surprised me. Even though the first season was marked by excellent storytelling, strong performances, and great production, most nights I was ready to move on to something else after watching a single episode. In the second season, I was compelled to stick around.
If you’re like me, this means that if you saw the first season and liked it, you might still be on the fence about whether to give the second season a look. If so, I’d advise you to give the new season a try. I’m pretty sure you’re going to find this season delivers the payoff that the first season only teased was coming.
Likewise, if you’re a spy fan who favors le Carré over Bond, Matt Helm, Flint, or (heaven forbid) Austin Powers and you missed season 1: watch it. If you’ve kinda been enjoying the Hugh Laurie spy series The Night Manager, but think it falls a bit short, this might rise to meet your hoped for expectations.
Inside The Agency
The second season dropped on Paramount+ on June 25, 1 1/2 years after season 1. The show is loosely based on French television’s The Bureau, a show that had a five-season run starting in 2015 and was focused on France’s principal spy agency, the General Directorate of External Security.
The Agency premiered in December, 2024, with a focus on CIA operations taking place through the agency’s London Office. It was created by brothers Jez and John-Henry Butterworth, who previously worked together on the 2015 Daniel Craig as Bond vehicle Spectre, and 2023’s Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny.
Even in the streaming era, for a TV show it’s dripping with star power (Adele might say, “Like a movie”), which includes George Clooney, who’s not seen on camera (not yet, anyway) but serves as an executive producer. Big-budget, on-screen headliners include Michael Fassbender, Jeffrey Wright, Hugh Bonneville, and Richard Gere, which gives the series more of a classic Hollywood feel than a 21st century Man from U.N.C.L.E.
The Agency’s Opening Act
Like The Night Manager, the story is complex, but unlike the Laurie vehicle, it never gets lost in obscure plot points. The first season is something of a spy-coming-in-from-the-cold story, focused on Brandon Colby, code named “Martian.” As the story begins, he’s going through the process of being debriefed and psychologically evaluated after having spent six years as a CIA NOC operative to take the job of Director of Operations at the CIA’s London Station.
Throughout, the story offers an insider’s view of spycraft, with involved story lines taking place both inside the agency’s London office, and following field work in London, Khartoum, and Tehran. Like a metaphorical tour through a sausage factory, what we see isn’t always appetizing. There are “nothing to see here” lies told — not only to the agency’s home office but to the White House itself — concerning cases in which the outcome could have dire global consequences.
There is also the brutal training that greenhorn recruits endure, not only to prepare them to be successful undercover agents living in hostile conditions, but to make sure the agents-in-training don’t crack under pressure. Here, the show details the experiences of Daniela ‘Danny’ Morata, codename ‘Grimlin,’ a new field officer played by Saura Lightfoot-Leon in a stand-out performance. In the first season we see her in training for a mission that will take her to Iran. In the second season, we see that training in action, when she’s actually working undercover in Tehran.
Act Two
Season 2 begins two months after the previous season ended and hits the ground running in a way the freshman season only promised. This change of pace, and Grimlin’s move from trainee to undercover spy working in an environment that’s dangerous for locals and far more dangerous for outsiders (especially if they’re caught working undercover for the US) aren’t the only ways that the show’s writers have made the new season stand out.
The show’s main focus is on Fassbender’s Martian, who comes to the second season with more inner demons to tackle, and who is always motivated by the consequences of the three primary relationships in his life.
This includes a complicated and toxic professional relationship that began years earlier with James ‘Jim’ Richardson, played by Hugh Bonneville, who starts the show as the senior MI6 in charge of the China Desk (and who’s central to season 1’s cliffhanger). More important than Richardson, perhaps, is a relationship he formed previous to the show’s beginning, while undercover in Sudan with anthropology professor Samia ‘Sami’ Zahir, who’s played by Jodie Turner-Smith in another stand-out performance.
Sami’s relationship with Martian — who she knows as Paul Lewis, his cover name when they met — eventually puts her in harm’s way.
Martian’s sacrifices to rescue Sami are a major second season theme, as is his relationship with his 17-year-old daughter played by India Fowler, a relationship that would be difficult even without her father’s work (and other complications) making matters worse.
Simply put, The Agency is a grade A espionage yarn, even if the first season is a bit slow at times. The series’ sophomore season is about as good as it gets in the modern day espionage genre, especially if you’re looking for something that smacks of the 21st century real world instead of genre cliches. The second season left with what seems to be yet another cliffhanger, meaning we’re likely to see another season.
If so, the question is whether the Butterworth brothers will be able to keep it fresh without resorting to a predictable more of the same.
Christine Hall has been working as a journalist since the 1970s. She’s currently the Editor in Chief and head writer at the open source-focused site FOSS Force.
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