The Agency Review: Michael Fassbender Stars as an Unsmiling Spy with Bedroom Eyes

In the opening episodes of The Agency, Paramount + With Showtime’s smart new espionage series, Michael Fassbender is a CIA agent known by the nickname “Martian.” For reasons that haven’t been explained to him by the higher-ups, he’s been recently — and abruptly — pulled out of an assignment in Ethiopia and reinstalled at the agency’s London headquarters. Now he’s meeting with a therapist, Dr. Blake (Harriet Sansom Harris), who’d love to suss out what’s going on in Martian’s head.

Good luck! Fassbender is colder, more closed in and at times scarcely more human than the android he played with such sly lethal humor in Alien: Covenant. His career, he explains to Dr. Blake, encourages insanity — perhaps requires it, given the job’s danger level and endless swapping of identities: “The person sitting in front of you is, was and will remain purely, deeply, 100 percent verifiably nuts.”

In other words he isn’t Tom Cruise in the Mission: Impossible franchise, pulling latex masks off his face to reveal himself with a gloating twinkle. Then again, maybe he’s playing his own secret game, trying to out-suss the therapist. His mask may be too subtle for us to detect — at least, not initially.

Still, even if his insanity plea is a ruse or even a supremely deadpan joke, this CIA isn’t going to make its way onto anyone’s list of best companies to work for. All the spies in The Agency — including Martian’s superior (American Fiction’s Jeffrey Wright) and his superior (Oh, Canada’s Richard Gere) —all seem to harbor in their bowels long, slowly writhing tapeworms of bureaucratic anxiety.

They have plenty to worry about. As the show begins, an agent posted in Minsk has gotten drunk, crashed his car and been taken into custody at the police station-from which he’s vanished without explanation. Other international crises soon come calling like loud, unwanted relatives barging in on a holiday meal.

But Martian isn’t making anyone’s job easier. Out on assignment he fell in love with a gorgeous professor, Sami Zahir (Jodie Turner-Smith). Now she’s in London, too, with an academic post that possibly camouflages an espionage agenda of her own. She and Martian resume their affair. This is playing with fire while conditioning your hair with gasoline.

The Agency, co-executive produced by George Clooney, is an excellent thriller, elegantly paced and densely tangled. It’s based on a French series, Le Bureau, possibly one of the best TV series of all time, but with differences in tone: Le Bureau’s headquarters was a crowded warren of conference rooms and offices, which kept you tightly focused on the spies’ intricate moves. The Agency unfolds in spacious, subtly lit rooms housed in an enormous complex, allowing for an airiness that sometimes lets the intensity uncoil and slip away.

That doesn’t keep this from being one of the most promising new shows out there. You get the urgency of world events, secret bedroom adventures and-oh!-that Fassbender, with his firm mouth, noble profile and burning gaze.

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New episodes launch Fridays on Paramount + With Showtime.