Happy Thanksgiving, one and all! Whether you’re doing turkey or a honey-baked ham, gathering about a dining room table or holing up with your dearest friends, this is one holiday that calls for a little streaming material. So, what’s on this long weekend?
Here, we gather a few fresh options—from spy and detective dramas to a miniseries about Formula 1 driver Ayrton Senna and a certain New York City parade. Scroll on for five new things to watch in the coming days.
The Agency
For those of us obsessed with the French espionage show The Bureau, an American remake was always going to be a tricky proposition. The very things that made the French series so deeply satisfying would also be the hardest to translate. There was the Parisian ordinariness of the cast; the banalities of office life at the intelligence agency, DGSE (how I loved watching spies eat French cafeteria food!); and the show’s contrapuntal rhythms of kinetic action and subtle tradecraft. The Bureau could be nothing but talk for long stretches, but the themes of loyalty and the way human feelings conflicted with state security kept you hooked. American TV has any number of spy shows; few reward close attention the way that The Bureau did over its five faultless seasons. Well, quelle surprise, The Agency, The Bureau’s handsome, engrossing, icily toned American version, is excellent.
Streaming on Paramount+ (via its Showtime plan) starting November 29, the series has a gold-plated cast—Michael Fassbender, Jeffrey Wright, Richard Gere, Jodie Turner-Smith, and more—and an equally prestigious writing team: playwright Jez Butterworth, working here with his brother John Henry Butterworth. The first two episodes were directed by Joe Wright (Anna Karenina, Atonement), and they don’t pander to whizz-bang American sensibilities: They are taut as a wire, moving with a stalker’s patience through a granite-shaded London. The setting is a rather grand American field station there, where an agent, code-named Merlin (Fassbender), has just returned from spending six years undercover in Ethiopia. Unbeknownst to his handler (Wright, who has secrets of his own), Merlin fell in love with a woman (Turner), an attachment he has not quite been able to leave behind.
Fassbender is the main reason these episodes work so well: his cold-blooded calm thinly masks a state of crisis. And to watch him shake the CIA’s own handlers, and interrogate a psychologist sent to evaluate him, is to watch a masterclass in leading-man antiheroics. The Agency also has B and C plots that closely mirror those of The Bureau’s first season, giving us well-choreographed action in Ukraine and the prospect of a dangerously green agent, Danny (Saura Lightfoot-Leon), going undercover to Iran. The episodes previewed to critics were far more polished and expensive-looking than their French source material, but they share The Bureau‘s intelligence and savoir faire. So far, so good. —Taylor Antrim
