‘The Agency’ Season 2 Review: All-Star Cast, Old-School Sensibility

Despite boasting a cast that looks straight out of a Hollywood tentpole—or at least a would-be awards contender—The Agency, the Butterworth brothers’ series, remains oddly under-discussed even after dropping its second season in full. Produced by George Clooney, this remake of the French show The Bureau stars Michael Fassbender alongside Jeffrey Wright, Richard Gere, Dominic West, Katherine Waterston, John Magaro, Hugh Bonneville, Jodie Turner-Smith, and Clayne Crawford, among others. Yet for all its pedigree and prestige, it rarely enters the broader conversation around current TV.

One obvious reason may be its home on Paramount+, a platform with a more limited international footprint than its competitors. Another, perhaps more decisive factor, is that the show never quite distinguishes itself—never fully breaks free from the genre’s predictability or the faintly mechanical competence of its execution. It’s not a bad series, far from it, but it carries the feel of something slightly dated, more in how it resolves its conflicts than in its geopolitics, which are very much of the present moment.

Part John le Carré, part globe-trotting action thriller, the series follows the professional and personal lives of a CIA office based in the UK, tracking several of its operatives and the cases that consume them. Season two picks up almost directly where the first left off, making it essential to start from the beginning if you want to fully grasp its already-in-motion web of secrets and shifting loyalties. Fassbender plays “Martian”—not his real name, just one of many aliases—a field agent returning to the CIA’s London station after a harrowing stint in Africa. Once back, he pursues a personal mission: to rescue his lover, Dr. Samia Zahir (Jodie Turner-Smith), who is being held prisoner in Sudan.

But that’s only one of several storylines in play. Danny (Saura Lightfoot-Leon) continues her high-risk work infiltrating Iran’s political elite, while Agent Taylor (Magaro) is sent on a covert operation to track down a mercenary known as “Viking” (Crawford), somewhere deep in Africa. At the same time, the CIA suspects there’s a mole leaking information both to enemy forces and to MI6, casting a wide net of suspicion across the office. Senior figures (Gere and Wright) are forced to pry into the private lives of their own operatives to determine who might be playing multiple sides. Viewers already know the answer—it was revealed at the end of season one—but the characters themselves are still in the dark, circling around various suspects without landing on the truth.

Unlike the first season, the second spreads the focus more evenly. While Martian remains the central axis—and Fassbender handles the character’s layered, often contradictory emotions with precision—the surrounding subplots gain more weight, cutting between dangerous locations across Africa and the Middle East and the cold, impersonal CIA offices where strategies are devised and others are sent out to risk their lives carrying them out.

The series moves forward with a certain understated elegance, trying not to bog itself down in exposition (though some of it is unavoidable), and anchored by half a dozen compelling characters who keep each thread engaging without the overall narrative losing momentum. At times—especially for viewers well-versed in the tropes of international espionage—the storylines can feel a bit routine. But this is where the cast proves invaluable. In their hands, The Agency has an edge that similar shows often lack. A tense CIA meeting played by Fassbender, Wright, West, Gere, Magaro, Waterston, and company simply carries a different weight than one led by lesser-known or less versatile actors. What the show may lack in originality, it makes up for with sheer on-screen talent.