Michael Fassbender's New Spy Show Is Smart, Fast, and Star ...

The Agency, I’m sad to say, is missing that je ne sais quoi of Le Bureau des Légendes.

If only I’d encountered Showtime’s new spy thriller having never seen its source material, the mid-2010s French drama known in English as The Bureau. I’d have no idea that something might be missing—that je ne sais quoi of the original—or that there was a different way to be for “Martian,” Michael Fassbender’s dead-in-the-eyes spy-who-came-in-from-the-cold character. I wouldn’t know that the French external security service is altogether more pleasant (at least in television dramas) than the CIA, which is so often portrayed as violence-loving (see: Lioness), bumbling (see: The Looming Tower), and overly bureaucratic (see: The Agency, where multiple lines are spent arguing over the relatively menial cost, given the CIA’s multibillion-dollar budget, of exfiltrating a source from a bad situation). But the fact is that I do know. And while I’ll keep going with The Agency—I’ve seen the first three episodes—I expect to feel some ennui for the first season’s duration.

The American remake hews almost shockingly close to the original. Joe Wright (Atonement, Pride & Prejudice) directed the first couple of episodes, and while the first episode is not a shot-for-shot redo of Le Bureau’s, it is damned close. Characters mirror each other, and the narrative elements are the same: A spy called back to HQ must hastily end a love affair in his undercover posting, hole up in a safe house for months before he can return to home base to train a new agent set to be deployed to Iran, and be reunited with his daughter. Meanwhile, in a parallel plotline, another undercover agent abroad has gotten drunk, been arrested, and disappeared—possibly into enemy arms, where his cover is potentially blown. A lot of stuff happens!

But as I watched The Agency, I had the sense that everything was rushed; I was failing to connect to any of the characters, really, except Jeffrey Wright’s Henry, Martian’s boss who is perpetually afflicted with le malaise. To be fair, Fassbender’s Martian is really the only way I can imagine a spy played by Fassbender to be: detached, impossible to read, icy. I love Michael Fassbender because he is both so hot and so deeply weird—both qualities hold in The Agency. His Martian is only a half-step away from his role as the unnamed assassin in David Fincher’s Netflix movie The Killer, where he performs both Vinyasa yoga sequences and murders with balletic alacrity. He doesn’t kill anyone in The Agency (yet, anyway), but his unnervingness is intact.

This would be fine except that his French counterpart in Le Bureau—“Malotru,” played by Mathieu Kassovitz—is the opposite: warm, soulful, deeply connected with others inside and outside the spy business, and with us, the viewers. We feel his passion for and sweetness toward Nadia, his forbidden love, and we root for both of them from the first moment. Everything is so, well, French! He always has red wine around, and he smokes. He seems like a dad, an ex-husband, and a lover. He is someone we would know, except he is a spy. We believe in his essential goodness, even as he breaks rules all over the place. We believe he’s doing it all for l’amour fou—for Nadia and for France. We like him so much.

Maybe the creators of The Agency decided that they needed to break from Kassovitz’s portrayal to distinguish their show. Or maybe once Fassbender signed on, they had to make his Martian a different (read: hot and weird) kind of guy instead of someone we’d actually like. Either way, there is, to me, a nearly fatal flaw in the decision: The forbidden relationship between our spy and his paramour is missing the actual chemistry required to undergird so much of what is sure to come in The Agency, given what happens in Le Bureau. This love affair has ramifications for global security! There is some sex between Martian and Sami (Jodie Turner-Smith), an Ethiopian historian he met during his deployment in Addis Ababa. But there is no electricity. Sami can voice-over the words, also nearly straight from Le Bureau—“It was dangerous. It was wrong. It had no future. But I wouldn’t have missed it for the world”—but it feels rote more than it does wistful.

I have some other complaints, but the funniest and most pedantic is about the fact that Richard Gere, who plays the head of the London CIA office where Martian is based, refers repeatedly to JSOC (the Joint Special Operations Command) as J-S-O-C, when it should be pronounced “jaysock.” Come on! Also, why is British broody middle-aged heartthrob Dominic West playing the director of the CIA? There really wasn’t a single square-jawed American for that role? (No offence to Dominic West, but really!)

The Agency premieres Thanksgiving weekend, and what I can say is: This would be a totally good show to watch with relatives. It’s smart, it moves, it’s got great people in it. You may need to pause and explain things—like when the show suddenly takes us to Ukraine or Belarus—to your aged uncle. But you’ll enjoy it. And then, when you have a chance for some temps seul, do try Le Bureau. I’m grateful that The Agency, at the very least, gave me a chance to go back for an encore.