The Agency ★★★★
Paramount+

In this quietly gripping espionage thriller, Michael Fassbender plays a CIA agent code named “Martian”. It’s a fitting handle: after six years undercover in Ethiopia the spy is like an alien. Martian searches his work-provided London apartment for bugs – he finds three – and navigates office chit-chat with locked-down wariness. He doesn’t want anyone to know who he really is, and as the season takes shapes it’s suggested that’s because Martian himself doesn’t actually know who he is.

With his chiselled facial features and mournful eyes, Martian is the perfect role for Fassbender, a movie star who excels at uneasy minimalism and icy retorts. Even as he works on a crisis in Belarus, where a CIA agent has gone missing, Martian lies to his superior, Henry Ogletree (Jeffrey Wright), about his connection to Samia Zahir (Jodie Turner-Smith), the Sudanese academic he was in love with. When she turns up in London, Martian is both excited and suspicious.

Already renewed for a second season, The Agency is adapted from the masterful French series The Bureau (Paramount+ has all five seasons). The show’s creators, playwrights and screenwriters Jez and John-Henry Butterworth (Ford v Ferrari), have hewed closely not just to that show’s plot, with Martian also training Daniela (Saura Lightfoot-Leon), a young agent taking the first steps towards an undercover assignment in Iran, but also its air of permanent tension and split-second calculations.

While the CIA offers a different, larger perspective than France’s DGSE, The Agency for the most part refuses to hold the audience’s hands. Commentary from an injured Martian comes via a flash-forward with unknown interrogators, and the narrative is always testing the audience in a similar way to Martian: who really is this person? What do they actually want? Some of Martian’s most loaded exchanges come with his bemused teenage daughter, Poppy (India Fowler), who knows who he works for.

Over the first four episodes previewed there are flashes of action, mostly involving an operation in war-torn Ukraine that not even the CIA station chief, Bosco (Richard Gere), has access to. The considered pacing, and labyrinthine storytelling, feel apt. This is a show that knows what it is building to, over this season and future ones. It’s the antithesis of both Netflix and Apple TV+’s London spy shows, respectively Black Doves and Slow Horses, and worthy in its own right.

Martian’s logic is dangerous but compelling – no balanced person could do what he does. When a CIA psychologist evaluates him, Martian offers telling reassurance: “You’re worried I may have become sane.” In some tragic way, he knows exactly who he is.