‘CIA’ Review: The Case for Old-School TV Amid Prestige TV Excess

This one should probably be titled “In Defense of Episodic Television”—except for one small complication: the show in question isn’t actually that good. Which makes it more interesting to talk about the idea than about CIA itself, a series I’ll get to in a moment. Because somewhere along the way—once TV stopped being disposable junk food and rebranded itself as Prestige Content™—the episodic format fell out of favor. The new orthodoxy demanded long-form storytelling, character arcs stretched across seasons, and the kind of psychological “depth” that supposedly elevated the medium beyond its procedural roots. And while that didn’t exactly kill the old model—those shows you can drop into for a single episode and move on—it did shove it into an even more dismissible corner than before.

The irony is that, over time, many of those “prestige” series have become just as mechanical, predictable, and formulaic as the episodic shows they replaced—only longer. Much longer. What used to take 45 minutes to resolve now sprawls across eight or ten episodes, sometimes more, with the same basic plot inflated to prestige length. And not always to great effect. The supposed complexity of character is often just another template, while the real difference lies in how many twists, fake-outs, and cliffhangers can be layered on top—or how many recognizable actors are thrown into the mix.

Not all shows fall into this trap, obviously. But enough do to make the pattern hard to ignore. Long-form television remains a great idea in principle; it’s just not always necessary. Some stories could be movies. Others might work best as a single, self-contained episode that begins, ends, and gets out of the way. And that’s where CIA, the new series from TV veteran Dick Wolf—creator of Law & Order, FBI, and more spin-offs than anyone can reasonably keep track of—comes in. It’s essentially a lateral extension of the FBI universe, and while the title doesn’t tell you everything, it gets the gist across.

No, it’s not about globe-trotting CIA operations so much as something murkier: what happens when the agency operates within U.S. borders, where it technically isn’t supposed to. The show’s solution is a neat bit of TV logic: create a special CIA unit that works alongside the FBI, thereby sidestepping legal constraints. And if you’re already bending the rules, why not pair up a CIA agent with an FBI counterpart and let the sparks fly?

So CIA plays like a hybrid of procedural thriller and buddy movie. On one side there’s Colin Glass (Tom Ellis), a shadowy operative with a flexible relationship to legality; on the other, Bill Goodman (Nick Gehlfuss), a by-the-book FBI agent who treats procedure like sacred text. It’s not exactly a match made in heaven, but you can guess where things are headed: beneath their differences, they share the same mission—protecting the United States from foreign threats, a theme very much in sync with the current zeitgeist.

No, CIA is not politically correct. And yes, the early episodes offer a generous buffet of scheming, murderous terrorists. But these shows operate with a Cold War mindset—the era in which network television ruled and neither cable nor streaming had complicated the landscape—and expecting otherwise feels beside the point. That said, there are a few surprisingly “modern” touches here and there, which you wouldn’t necessarily expect from a show airing on CBS, arguably the most traditional and conservative of the major U.S. networks.

Each case in CIA begins and ends within a single episode—a structure that, in something like Homeland or its many imitators, might stretch across an entire season or even more. The result is a brisk, lightweight, action-forward show. Sure, it’s predictable—somewhere between obvious and banal—and the characters and dialogue barely meet the minimum WGA standard. But at least it’s over in 40 minutes. There are shows just as shallow that insist on presenting themselves as complex and demand eight times the commitment to arrive at roughly the same destination.

In the pilot, our antiheroes deal with a weapon that functions like a directed energy wave threatening New York City. Problem solved. Next episode: Lebanese terrorists enter the country with ominous plans—also contained and wrapped up within the hour, after a couple of perfunctory twists. And so it goes. Meanwhile, Colin and Bill slowly learn to respect each other, even as both keep parts of their lives—and their work—hidden from the rest of the team, which includes Nikki and Gina, their boss and tech analyst, respectively.

Everything moves fast. Too fast, maybe. There’s no time for reflection, red herrings are exposed within minutes, and each episode wraps up with a familiar mix of suspense, a hint of emotion, and a last-minute reveal. Nothing more, nothing less. CIA isn’t going to change television history, and it doesn’t pretend to. It’s a throwback to an older model of network TV, built on somewhat outdated ideas about how the world works. But at least it gets the job done quickly—and leaves you free to do something else with your time.