Michael Fassbender, left, plays Martian and Jodie Turner Smith plays Samia Zahir in The Agency.Luke Varley/Paramount+
The Bureau, an exceptional French television show about spies that ran from 2015 to 2020, has been remade into an American one called The Agency, now streaming on Paramount+.
There is much to like about it – most of all, Michael Fassbender’s intense yet vulnerable lead performance as a CIA spook named Martian, who returns to his London base after six years undercover in Ethiopia still in love with a woman he met there.
But The Agency lacks a certain je ne sais quoi compared with its Paris-set predecessor.
Well, actually, je sais what the quoi is that’s missing: the French.
The original show, created by Éric Rochant, was a spy thriller with a subtle tone that reflected Gallic temperaments and a plot built around the legacy of France’s colonialist past and the country’s current status as a second-tier power.
Neither mood nor story has been adapted enough for The Agency. It closely follows the contours of the original French scripts in its first two episodes and even directly translates some of the dialogue.
So The Agency itself feels like it is undercover – operating under a false identity.
Of course, like so many prestige American TV series, it’s made mostly by British artists. English filmmaker Joe Wright (Darkest Hour; Atonement) directs the first episode and the Butterworth brothers – the great playwright Jez and his younger sibling John-Henry – are the showrunners.
However, a big part of what originally made The Bureau so appealing to viewers was that it was not an American or British spy show. The Direction générale de la Sécurité extérieure (DGSE), France’s foreign intelligence agency, was a less familiar presence on the small screen.
The Bureau was emphatically not about the CIA; it wasn’t Alias or 24 or Homeland or Jack Ryan or a dozen other shows you could name. The U.S. agency played a role in the narrative, but the American spies were sometimes allies and sometimes threats – and they always elicited sighs when they showed up.
The French spies in Le Bureau didn’t just go about their job differently – with more wine, more bureaucracy and regular intimate therapy-style video calls with their handlers – they also did things in a more restrained way.
The Agency’s adapters seem to want to keep the vibe of the French original, yet they also seem anxious that not enough Americans will want to tune in. They can’t resist throwing in adrenaline-filled action sequences into its pre-existing plot.
Richard Gere, who plays the director of intelligence, can’t help but swagger and bully in the role.Luke Varley/Paramount+
There’s a scene in the first episode of both series where an undercover operative in a foreign country is arrested for drunk driving, for instance. In The Bureau, he is grabbed by Algerian police after rolling down the street at an extremely slow speed. In The Agency, the agent in question puts pedal to the metal and whizzes by the police in Belarus, then leads them on a wild car chase that ends in a big crash.
Similarly, in the second episode, a series of scenes that built up excruciating tension in the French version have been exchanged for a firefight that relieves tension in the U.S. one.
The Agency can’t fully resist the American urge to be beautiful, either.
Martian and his colleagues work out of a gorgeous new building in the British capital that is shaped like a gemstone; this London field office of the CIA has floor-to-ceiling windows. The Bureau’s DGSE‚ by contrast, worked out of a heritage building that was ugly and located in an unfashionable arrondissement of Paris. The handlers’ working areas were cramped, too close to each other and under an angled ceiling with little round windows. Everyone ate together at shared tables in a subsidized cafeteria.
The leads on the French series were not bad looking but they and their lovers weren’t necessarily contenders for the Most Beautiful issue of People magazine. The same can’t be said for Jodie Turner-Smith, the British actor who plays Martian’s lover on The Agency, or Richard Gere, who here plays the director of intelligence – and, come to think of it, actually is a former Sexiest Man Alive.
Gere can’t help but swagger and bully in the role. I missed Gilles Cohen’s passive-aggressive peevish performance and bad haircut in the analogous role in the French version. It was more original – something we hadn’t seen before.
You might wonder: Why not just switch over to Taylor Sheridan’s Lioness, the other CIA show on Paramount+, and get all the explosions and gorgeous mugs and big acting you’d like?
The Agency’s theme song is Jack White’s version on U2′s Love is Blindness. Very appropriate: an American cover of a European tune.
The Agency drops episodes weekly starting Nov. 29 on Paramount+.
