When I wrote about the TV series Slow Horses, last month, I mentioned how one of the departures from the source novels was that the show didn’t take advantage of the potential of sleeper agents to act as metaphors for the migrant experience. By contrast, this allegorical resonance has been all over a veritable flood of shows in the past decade dealing with Cold War-era communist moles. I’m not entirely sure who started this, but the first high-profile entry was The Americans (2013-2018), which used the premise of a couple of KGB agents raising a nuclear family in 1980s’ Washington to explore the theme of secret double lives and US immigration, as well as more specific facets of the Reagan era.
In turn, The Americans had a pretty crude understanding of communism and of the Cold War as a whole. At least in the few episodes I watched, the conflict came off as a relatively traditional war between nations (the ‘motherland’), devoid of a distinct ideological dimension. Plus, outside of the internally torn protagonists, the Soviets were such brazenly vile cardboard caricatures that I couldn’t really buy into the couple’s loyalty to the USSR beyond basic notions of brainwashing… Ironically, it’s as if the show just bought into the mindset of the very era it was portraying, without any critical distance.
The same tendency can be seen abroad, most notably in the Portuguese Glória (2021) as well as in the German Deutschland 83 and its two sequels, Deutschland 86 and Deutschland 89 (2015-2020). As pure thrillers, these shows have a lot going for them, what with the stylish direction, knotty intrigue, and killer soundtrack, in addition to some truly original settings, ranging from a Radio Free Europe operation in 1960s’ Portugal to arms deals in 1980s’ northern and southern Africa (including a venture into the Angolan Civil War, which was a conflict with so many different players and odd alliances that it’s a wonder it doesn’t pop up more often in the genre).
In both cases, the hook is great, as the protagonists are working for the KGB and the Stasi’s HVA, respectively, so the results could’ve been perversely challenging, getting us invested in a view of the Cold War that runs counter to that of most western spy fiction. Sadly, though, the shows don’t live up to this potential. Glória comes the closest, but the very fact that it paints the local resistance against Portugal’s fascist regime and colonial wars as largely subordinate to – callous and murderous – Soviet agents ends up reproducing the very propaganda of the Portuguese dictatorship. Similarly, Deutschland ticks all the boxes of West German conservative rhetoric (it even accuses the peace movement of being naively manipulated by gay GDR infiltrators) and never misses a chance to mock East Germany’s orthodoxy, immorality, and poverty in a way that smacks of Schadenfreude.
While there could be dramatic appeal in the tale of a desperate intelligence service (which has to count pennies after Gorbachev reduces Soviet support) fighting what we now know to be a losing fight, for that to work the East Germans had to be anti-heroes to some extent rather than fully pathetic and contemptible all the time. Granted, some of Deutschland’s mockery is quite funny (like when they steal a floppy disk but have no clue what to do with it) and much of it deserved… But the show actually goes out of its way to score political points, as if it’s still fighting the Cold War after all these years – it seems less interested in telling a rich account of the past that takes in the conflict’s contradictions and ambiguities than in demonstrating the West’s superiority (except for the French, who are also assholes). Perhaps the creators just don’t trust the audience, fearing we will forget and forgive all that was bad about the GDR if we get even the slightest glimpse of unsoiled humanity and idealism.
Thus, if in the first season the East Germans appear as responsible for the Able Archer 83 scare that may have brought the world closer than ever to thermonuclear war, the second season manages to twist one of the areas where the GDR was on the ‘best’ side of history, having backed up anticolonialism in Africa… Bafflingly, Deutschland 86 has them cynically supplying weapons to apartheid South Africa (which could have been an amusing bit of counterintuitive comedy if the show wasn’t so committedly one-sided) while, more predictably, making a point to emphasize their connections to Libyan terrorism. Plus, in an extra reactionary touch, the featured black Africans mostly lack agency in the proceedings, essentially acting as puppets of the whites (just like western propaganda used to argue).
To be fair, by the time we get to the third season, Deutschland 89, we’ve followed these characters for so long that something touching slips through as they see their entire world crumble along with the Berlin Wall. There is some further ideological confusion (the show seems unaware that, by then, Italy’s PCI was no longer a pro-Soviet communist party) and, once again, the Left appears as utterly sinister and/or hypocritical while the Right escapes largely unscathed, despite a few jabs near the very end. At least there is a fairly neat moment when an East German visionary tries to start a business of computers with pre-installed cameras, only to be told that the whole notion is just too Stasi-like… Still, we certainly remain far, far away from the nuanced satire of 2003’s Good Bye Lenin!
By contrast, the Romanian series Spy/Master (2023) is everything I wanted. Set in the late 1970s, this heavily fictionalized version of Ion Mihai Pacepa’s defection also follows an undercover KGB agent, but with the extra twist that he is infiltrated in another communist country, namely Romania (which had excluded the Soviets from its foreign policy in 1964). Add to this subplots about corruption, interdepartmental paranoia, Middle East peace talks, and the involvement of the secret services of half a dozen different countries. The result is an elaborate tapestry that tells a much more stimulating story than the traditional East vs West dichotomy… and which Spy/Master pulls off through a highly effective economy of information, expertly weaving the various threads (even as it continuously jumps back and forth in time!) and letting things play out without preaching.
Alternatively, if you like your spy fiction with a dryer, colder, darker, more slow-burn atmosphere, you may prefer the Czech The Sleepers (2019). Mostly set on the eve of 1989’s Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia, this mini-series features the usual bits of tradecraft (dead drops, triple agents, counter-surveillance maneuvers to throw off pursuers), but subsumes them in greater dramatic complexity and melancholia. In contrast to the triumphalist pop euphoria of Deutschland 89, here we get a fascinatingly unconventional portrayal of communism’s final days: the characters – especially those working for the secret police StB – feel on the verge of a massive historical change (Poland and Hungary have fallen, the GDR seems on the way) without quite knowing what lies ahead, so the general mood is one of cloudy alienation and uncertainty. What’s more, because this is a 21st-century show, it also retroactively anticipates elements of the then-future/now-present (like the troubled relation with Russia), offering a disenchanted outlook of the transition into liberal democracy, with the country (now two countries) persistently spied upon and manipulated by foreign forces.
I don’t know whether there is something in the air or if it’s just some algorithm telling Netflix and HBO to co-fund this type of productions, but, regardless, one of the positive side effects of the popularity of all these foreign spy series about lesser-known historical episodes is that mainstream media is finally projecting, in one way or another, the fact that the Cold War was a global conflict involving many other players beyond the superpowers. (Although not exactly a spy thriller, I would add to this list the Finnish Invisible Heroes (2019), about Scandinavian diplomats who find themselves in the middle of the 1973 coup in Chile.) We’re used to seeing Czechoslovakia, Romania, Germany, or Portugal as chessboard pieces in the geostrategy of the CIA, KGB, and MI6, but by mostly focusing on the locals’ experiences and perspectives, we’ve now been increasingly presented with a different, humanizing picture in which Cold War games appear as even more sinister and intrusive.
More recently, the awesome filmmaker Park Chan-wook put his own gonzo spin on the red mole subgenre with The Sympathizer (2024), based on Viet Thanh Nguyen’s best-seller about a North-Vietnamese agent infiltrated in South Vietnam and, eventually, in the United States. Again, we have a mole who can’t help being a mole, his greatest asset also being his greatest peril, namely the fact he’s ultimately torn between two worlds, feeling more comfortable on enemy ground than in his home turf. Yet here the vibe is much more iconoclastic: kicking off just before 1975’s fall of Saigon (which has gained a renewed impact since 2021’s fall of Kabul), the show takes the piss out of all the sides in the conflict with manic, contagious glee, unafraid of indulging in tasteless absurdity… Park Chan-wook even works in his typical obsession with food and, especially, mollusks (including a bit about squids that will sit in my memory next to the octopuses of Oldboy and The Handmaiden) while executive producer Robert Downey Jr keeps showing up in multiple roles, each one more caricatural than the previous one.
I wasn’t the biggest fan of Park Chan-wook’s adaptation of Little Drummer Girl, but here I think he found the right material on which to apply his baroque touch. If the former seemed like a weird homage to theatre, this one provides a suitable celebration of film language, from rhythmic tracking shots to stream-of-consciousness rewinds and cheeky visual transitions. In part, the quasi-surreal approach works because over the years the Vietnam War has been reduced to such stylized, recognizable imagery in American pop culture, something that The Sympathizer self-reflexively engages with in the wonderful fourth episode (directed by Fernando Meirelles), set in Hollywood. It is to the show’s credit that it somehow manages pull off actual pathos among all the vicious chaos, matryoshka-like narrative, metafiction, and Tropic Thunder-esque black comedy.
That said, it’s not as if you can’t do an earnest, intelligent take on the old East-vs-West bipolarity. Even setting aside the espionage dimension of the alt-history saga For All Mankind (2019-2024), two of the most brilliant series in recent years did so. BBC’s The Game (2014) was set in 1972 and concerned an elaborate counterintelligence operation against an ominous Soviet conspiracy in the UK. Also from Britain, A Spy Among Friends (2022) was a loose adaptation of a non-fiction book about Kim Philby’s defection to the USSR, focusing in particular on his ambiguous escape from Beirut in 1963.
Both series are superb, but the latter is especially well written, acted, and edited. At first, I feared the project was just going to add up to yet another retread of this much trodden case – which has been dramatized and fictionalized to death – but I was very positively surprised: besides being engrossingly intricate (i.e. definitely binge-worthy) and sophisticated in tone (despite a gratuitous Goldfinger joke in episode 2), the story adds a poignant revisionist twist which – not unlike Robert Harris’ Munich – derives its force precisely from of our knowledge about the future and our likely prejudices cemented over time.
While A Spy Among Friends does not avoid the cliché of irredeemably unlikable Soviet villains, at least it recognizes the danger in the paranoia, division, and elitism at home… The show follows John le Carré’s class-based interpretation that Kim Philby got away with his double dealings for so long because the British establishment was so used to disregarding/covering up the shadiest elements of the ‘inner circle.’ In fact, I would argue this series truly earns its place among the extensive intertextual dialogue about Philby by the likes of le Carré and Graham Greene. And, needless to say, it’s impossible to watch it now without thinking of the current relation with Russia, making one hope that the Cold War remains a thing of the past… and of damn good fiction.
Last time, I finished with nod to a whole other take on the genre, more focused on escapist thrills than in real-world politics. And, sure enough, there have also been occasional throwbacks to the sort of super-spy yarns that were all the rage in the swinging sixties (particularly in Europe). In this regard, I actually had high hopes for Pennyworth (2019-2022), a show that seemed designed from scratch to be discussed in Gotham Calling, as it is a period piece spy thriller premised on a hilariously pointless deep cut of Batman lore (they even subtitled it The Origin of Batman’s Butler) that gradually ties into an Alan Moore comic! Set in a heightened-reality quasi-gothic alternate 1960s London riddled with conspiracies and secret societies, this prequel to Gotham was similarly – and unabashedly – artificial: there were some nice lines buried among the many clichés and forced British slang, yet the whole thing was so overplayed that it became a generally unpleasant, ultra-violent, thick-lined cartoon, as if written by edgelord teenagers who have heard of adult concepts (class division, fascism, the Malayan Emergency…) without fully grasping them. Ultimately, Pennyworth tried too damn hard to be cool (which, ironically, is uncool) and it veered too closely into just my sort of stuff for me not to notice when it was missing the mark.
As far as I’m concerned, the gold standard for rip-roaring spy-fi adventure on the small screen remains Agent Carter (2015-2016), MCU’s spin-off of Captain America: The First Avenger set in 1940s New York City (and later Los Angeles). The hook was that Peggy Carter, instead of getting pushed into domesticity like many women in the postwar years, struggled to continue kicking ass as an agent of the Strategic Scientific Reserve (S.H.I.E.L.D.’s predecessor). Now, I’m already a sucker for the trope of the underestimated woman who proves everybody wrong, but Agent Carter approached it in a particularly satisfying way, not only because of the historical background, but also because this choice always felt organic rather than preachy… The trope was cleverly put in the service of humor, characterization, and storytelling.
Another effectively deployed trope is the figure of the psycho Russian killer who develops a sort of fascination and mutual recognition regarding the hero – a dynamic that revisits Cold War stereotypes (hell, it’s practically a metaphor for the Cold War itself!) while also anticipating Killing Eve (which actually has quite a bit in common with Agent Carter). But whereas the latter show pushed wickedness to a point where it often became frightening and even disturbing, the former mostly kept the focus on bouncy action and lighthearted comedy.
Indeed, this show nailed such a specific witty vibe and engaging cast that it baffles me why Agent Carter hasn’t become a regular comic, even after Kathryn Immonen and Rich Ellis have proven how well it could work with a fun mini-series back in 2015, followed by a special.
Agent Carter: S.H.I.E.L.D. 50th Anniversary