Suggestion for diary producers in need of inspiration: add in their weekly diaries, in addition to the name of the saint and the cooking recipe to be tested, an episode of a spy series to watch each day. The Legends Office (Canal +) on Monday, The Night Agent (Netflix) on Tuesday, Tehran (Apple TV+) on Wednesdays, The Night Manager (Prime Video) on Thursday… We could easily last a month without watching the same program twice. And without getting bored, the genre has this gift of captivating the viewer even when the plot is shaky.
This Friday, December 1, we must add season 3 of Slow Horses (Apple TV+), British series about a gang of idiot intelligence agents, relegated to an MI5 closet. Surprise, after a few burlesque gags – we have to portray the stupidity of these under-gifted James Bondists – the program, adapted from the romantic saga of Mick Herron, turns out to be an absolute success. The humor is exquisitely purely English; the scenario, breathtaking, unfolds like a ball of wool, assuming strong biases – it is not because we have seen you for more than ten minutes on screen that you will survive – and dodging at best clichés of the genre, like the famous mole necessarily nestled as close as possible to the Prime Minister’s entourage. So much so that we would be tempted to place the series at the top of the pantheon of the genre, alongside the iconic Legends Office and the precursor The Americans, broadcast by FX (Disney+ in France) from 2013 to mid-2018, a realistic fresco on the life of clandestine Russian spies disguised as an American couple without history.
If these secret agent stories are so popular, it is obviously because they contain all the ingredients that make a good suspense series: plot with mysterious ramifications, possibility of betrayals, spectacular twists and turns. The geopolitical context also gave the screenwriters an ideal backdrop to lend credibility to their intrigues. From 2011, Homeland was the first series to focus on the CIA’s fight against post-September 11 Islamist radicalization. How not to be seized by the relationship with current events in Tehran, story of the mission of a young Mossad hacker in the Iranian capital? Even a less worked program like The Recruit (Netflix), a comedy about a CIA lawyer who became a field agent somewhat by chance, skillfully captures the new world order by imagining an infiltration into Belarusian circles close to the Kremlin.
Not all of these series are successful, far from it. Among the failures, the overly caricatured Designated Survivor (Netflix), the story of a junior member of the American government who becomes president after an attack, a sort of soap opera with secret defense clearances, whose stereotypical twists and turns can be guessed three episodes in advance. In January 2023, several ex-CIA agents were getting annoyed in The Guardian from the too important place given in several programs to firearms, rarely used in the real life of a spy. It is undoubtedly there, in the level of verisimilitude and the resistance to the facilities of entertainment, that the finesse of a great spy series is gauged. In The Legends Office, Legend has it that even the fancy ties worn by Henri Duflot, the head of the clandestine service played by Jean-Pierre Darroussin, are inspired by the authentic collection of a former DGSE hierarch.