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When popular action heroes like James Bond and Ethan Hunt have dominated what most people think of as the spy genre, it’s understandable that most people have no clue what spies actually do — namely, infiltrate dangerous places and collect intelligence for the government.
It’s also understandable that most people don’t realize that the enemy is not nearly as clear-cut as Spectre or the Syndicate, well-funded terrorist organizations with the motives and capacity to destroy the planet. All too frequently, the actual enemies are more humdrum: drug cartels, mafias, fanatical terrorists, and Marxist and fascist insurrectionists in the Third World. And usually, those enemies are mixed in with ostensible allies, making a spy’s work both morally and politically ambiguous.
When these two clarifiers are accounted for, it becomes clear that the primary work of spies and the agencies they work for involves far less shooting and parkour and far more data analysis and legal paperwork. In such a context, the real heroes become the lawyers and paper-pushers who are able to somehow navigate through the bureaucracy of today’s intelligence agencies. But how entertaining would a story about a lawyer managing a case for such an agency really be?
In the case of Netflix’s recent series “The Recruit,” it turns out such a story would be quite entertaining and rightly critical of today’s intelligence organizations and their spies. By dispensing with the many tropes that have come to define the spy genre, “The Recruit” offers a refreshing take that returns this world to reality.
The show focuses on a young CIA lawyer Owen Hendricks who, in his first days at the CIA, becomes entangled with a Belarusian spy Max Maladze who threatens to leak classified information if the agency doesn’t release her from prison. As he handles this assignment, he is forced to deal with backstabbing colleagues, rivals from other departments, powerful politicians, along with armed thugs working for a wide array of criminal organizations.
While the show features more than enough action sequences — mostly Owen finding himself in the wrong place at the wrong time — much of the show’s interest comes in its Machiavellian (and apparently surprisingly realistic) portrayal of intelligence agencies.
