What would it take for you to believe that your partner has been compromised by a foreign power? Muttered Russian words in their sleep? A stash of secret documents under the floorboards? Mysterious phone calls during movie night? These are the questions posed in Netflix’s new conspiracy thriller, Treason, which finds Charlie Cox at the reins of MI6 but under the spotlight of both the CIA and his wife.
Adam Lawrence (Cox) becomes the new C, head of the Secret Intelligence Service, after his predecessor (Ciarán Hinds) is poisoned in a London private members’ club. “Your whole career has been building up to this,” his wife Maddy (Oona Chaplin) tells him. “Will you still be taking the bins out?” Of course Adam will still be taking the bins out! That’s because he balances a high-flying career with being a reliable family man. Two kids from his first marriage, Callum (Samuel Leakey) and Ella (Beau Gadsdon), round out this handsome nuclear set-up.
But all is not quite what it seems. The assassin who incapacitated the previous C turns out to be Kara (Olga Kurylenko), who used to be both a Russian agent and Adam’s lover. She has engineered Adam into his role at MI6 so that he can help with her off-the-record investigations. But this rocket-fuelled trajectory has raised suspicions with the CIA, and their agent Dede (Tracy Ifeachor). “The CIA has been watching Adam’s rise,” Dede tells Maddy, who just happens to be an old friend. “It’s been meteoric. We think Adam’s been compromised.”
And so begins a cat-and-mouse game, part spy potboiler, part relationship drama. On top of that, there’s some strange political commentary running in the background: a leadership election within the ruling party (ring any bells?) pits Robert Kirby (Simon Lenagan), backed by Russian money, against Alex Kingston’s foreign secretary Audrey Gratz. It is typical of a show that is assembled from many – too many – parts. Political intrigue, relationship disharmony, international affairs, kidnapping, blackmail, trafficking. So many different threads of plot are rolled up here that you could use it to keep a kitten distracted for hours.
But overambition is clearly preferable to a lack of creative aspiration. It’s a shame, then, that Treason is so relentlessly preposterous. Not only does Cox utterly fail to convince as someone competent or ambitious enough to be made head of MI6 at 40, but the show insists on saddling him with endless cliché. Russians hold covert meetings at the Orthodox church, scheming oligarchs seek to influence elections, rendezvous take place at the dirty skatepark on the South Bank.
And if cliché is the pound cake in the trifle, implausibility is the jelly. Adam’s illicit liaisons with Kara are conducted, recklessly, via his work phone, while a whole team of MI6 operatives are unable even to make an arrest on a floating houseboat. Swimming in this custard, the actors appear at sea – only Kurylenko (who has been hard done by in Hollywood since her Bond girl outing) comes away with any credit. Generally, the line-reading (hindered by clangers such as “It doesn’t matter how Adam got here... he’s crossed over now”) simply stifles the action. The result, like so many Netflix shows, is naff – but, unlike so many Netflix shows, uncompelling.
Spy dramas fall into two essential categories: the cerebral ones (like the adaptations of le Carré, Alan Furst or Mick Herron) and the nail-biting ones (Spooks, 24 and Homeland). Treason is neither of these things. Too dumb to introduce any nuance, too trite to sustain any tension. For a show about intelligence, Treason is sadly lacking any.
