'The Agency' and 'The Night Agent' Are Secret Agent Thrillers Without Enough Thrills
The Night Agency
Secret agent thrillers are the most popular subgenre of Dad Shows. This week, I’m briefly writing about two of them, The Agency and The Night Agent. (I call them secret agent thrillers because The Night Agent isn’t technically about a spy, but he is an undercover agent working for a secret division of the FBI. I strive for accuracy, you know? It’s more of a conspiracy thriller than a spy thriller, but it has enough spy thriller elements to feel like a spy thriller.) The Agency’s Season 1 finale is this weekend and it’s already been renewed for Season 2, and The Night Agent returns for Season 2 today and has been picked up for Season 3. These are hit shows, but should they be?
I only have time to write about one Season 2 of a Netflix show about a handsome young white man in over his head at his job at an alphabet agency, so I’m skipping The Recruit, which returns on Jan. 30 and is the less popular of the two. It’s odd to me that Netflix is releasing these similar shows so close together. The Recruit is going to get buried. I only watched one episode of The Recruit, and I’m generalizing how similar they are based on their premises and appearance. But if you weren’t paying close attention, would you notice if you clicked on one thinking it was the other?
The Agency makes me wish I were watching The Bureau
I wanted to write about this spy drama when it premiered in November, but I don’t subscribe to Paramount+ with Showtime and I never got screeners. But now, ahead of this week’s season finale, the first two episodes are available to sample on base-tier Paramount+. So I checked them out. I had one question in mind as I watched: Do I enjoy this enough to upgrade my subscription to watch the whole season?
The Agency is based on a French series called The Bureau, which is a truly excellent spy thriller. It’s about a CIA field agent who comes home from working deep cover and continues the affair he was having in the field. She doesn’t know who he really is. He doesn’t know who he really is either, but in a more philosophical way. She literally thinks he’s a guy who doesn’t exist. It’s a “spy loses his sense of self” show. There are a lot of those. The Bureau is one of the best. The Agency has the same plot, but isn’t quite as good. It lacks that je ne sais quoi.
In The Agency, Michael Fassbender plays the spy. Fassbender is a great actor, but he has a certain type of extremely intense energy. Even in comedies, he’s extremely intense (check out Kneecap on Netflix to see an example of comic Fassbender). He just looks hardcore. You see his hollow-cheeked face and the shape of his torso, and you think “there’s a guy who does triathlons.” I don’t know if he actually does, but he looks like he does. In The Bureau, the spy is played by Mathieu Kassovitz, who looks like a Frenchman who works in an office. I mean, he’s a good-looking guy, but he looks more normal than Fassbender. Kassovitz was the love interest in Amelie. If Fassbender played the love interest in a whimsical romantic comedy, it would be satirical, an against-type riff on his intensity. He would be a scary guy who turns out to have a gentle heart. Fassbender has the aura of an adrenaline junkie, so there isn’t the same tension as there would be watching a guy who looks like Kassovitz in The Bureau risk an international incident for another night with Jodie Turner-Smith. Part of what makes The Bureau so cool is that you’re watching a guy with the appearance and demeanor of an accountant do spy stuff. Kassovitz’s stressed-out expression and lanyard around his neck makes the world of espionage seem super realistic and not glamorous, which sets The Bureau apart from other spy shows. The Agency is a little more glammed-up, which makes it lose some of its distinctive personality.
There’s other stuff going on in The Agency, too. An operative goes missing and his handlers have to figure out what happened to him, and a young agent gets sent into the field for the first time. Richard Gere is the ball-busting station chief, and he’ll make you say “Damn, where has Richard Gere been? He’s great.”
But overall, I found The Agency to be a little too slow-paced and devoted to talkily probing the psychology of people who would choose the life of a spy. It’s been done so many times before, and I find this kind of thing somewhat boring when the episodes are long and shapeless like this. Episodic flaccidity has always been a problem with Showtime shows, and the shift to Paramount+ hasn’t changed it. So my answer is that I will not be upgrading my subscription.
The Night Agent makes me wish I were watching The Blacklist
The Night Agent Season 1 was a surprise smash for Netflix in March 2023. It’s still Netflix’s seventh-most-watched English-language show of all time. Season 2 premieres today. I watched two episodes. I don’t anticipate watching more.
The success of The Night Agent is very interesting to me. Conventional wisdom for contemporary TV is that shows need a strong hook to stand out. People won’t pay attention unless there’s a gimmicky premise or a big star. The Night Agent disproves that. Star Gabriel Basso was not famous when the show premiered, and he’s still not very famous. I also don’t find him to be particularly charismatic. He’s not a bad actor, he’s just not memorable (though I just read a profile of him in Variety where he came off more like a libertarian trad-poster than a rising actor, so I will remember him now). If you’re a Night Agent fan, please explain his appeal in the comments. I am willing to be persuaded, I just need to know what I’m looking for.
The Night Agent also has a very straightforward premise that doesn’t jump off the page as “I need to see that.” It’s about a young, low-level FBI agent assigned to monitor a secret, emergency phone line. One night, the phone rings, and it drops him into the center of a conspiracy that goes all the way to the top, as conspiracies tend to do. It’s a familiar premise, and The Night Agent doesn’t do anything especially fresh with it. I guess the emphasis of the romantic plotline between Peter the Night Agent and Rose the young tech entrepreneur who called him looking for help is notable, and is the best part of the show. And it makes The Night Agent a show that appeals to moms and dads. Dads come for the action, moms come for the romance. It’s not complicated.
That lack of complication is ultimately what I think is behind The Night Agent’s success. It’s currently Netflix’s foremost CBS-style show. It’s not a procedural, but it has procedural qualities that appeal to a mass audience, such as a fast-paced and preposterous plot, simple dialogue, and broad performances. It’s not elevated. The Agency is elevated. It has atmosphere and ambivalence. The Night Agent has no such ambitions. I’m not saying one is good and one is bad; both shows are middling, and The Night Agent actually achieves what it’s trying to do better than The Agency does. But The Night Agent is less ambitious.
In some ways, The Night Agent reminds me of The Blacklist, which aired on NBC for nine seasons and is a popular library show on Netflix. Both shows are produced by Sony, and they’re both about young FBI agents whose lives are changed by one fateful event (a phone call on The Night Agent, James Spader walking into the office on The Blacklist). But The Blacklist was weirder and more fun than The Night Agent. It embraced the inherent silliness of its premise (a criminal mastermind helping the FBI take down rival criminal masterminds one at a time) but played it straight. Honestly, as Netflix gets more into making broadcast-style shows, it should do a show like The Blacklist. An episodic criminal conspiracy show with big characters and an overarching mystery. The Night Agent makes me yearn for something crazier.
You’re not wrong with your assessments. I can speak to “the agency” not being as good. “The night agent”
Was too long but that’s not unique to this show
i began and then rejected Night Agent. The Night Manager, though, with Hugh Laurie, is a great show.