Aficionados of high-end box set dramas – the kind that you can happily binge two or three episodes of a night - may currently be finding themselves in something of a lull. Presumed Innocent has come to its controversial conclusion; the fourth series of Slow Horses is still a few weeks away; and the eagerly awaited second season of The Night Manager won’t be on our screens before 2025 at the absolute earliest.
If you’re looking to sate yourself with what’s out there now, you’re likely to be disappointed by the underwhelming likes of Lady in the Lake and Sugar on Apple TV, and equally let down by the knowledge that, in the post-Crown era of Netflix, it’s Bridgerton or bust for you.
Still, there is something slightly under-the-radar but spectacularly gripping to watch if you’re not entirely averse to subtitles (if you are, admittedly, more fool you) and are keen to delve into one of the most purely gripping television series of the past decade. I am referring, naturally, to the French series Le Bureau des Légendes, aka The Bureau, which first aired on Canal+ in 2015.
It swiftly became a cult hit, raved about by everyone from the French newspaper Le Figaro (which, after the thunderous first season, declared that it was the greatest television series ever made in the country) to the New York Times, who called it the third best international show of the past decade. GQ put it even more succinctly: “it is not hyperbole to say that what The Wire did for the cop show, the French drama The Bureau is doing for the 21st-century espionage drama. It’s essential streaming, period.”
One of the reasons why it may not have been on your to-watch list before now is that it has previously been inaccessible on streaming services; your best bet was to pay through the nose on Amazon Prime or AppleTV or buy each season on DVD. Now, however, it is making its debut on Paramount+, in advance of the much-anticipated, George Clooney-produced, Michael Fassbender-starring “reimagining”, which is being broadcast on the streaming service later this year.
It may very well be excellent - it has a starry supporting cast in the form of Jeffrey Wright, Richard Gere and Jodie Turner-Smith, and boasts a script by award-winning playwright Jez Butterworth and his brother John-Henry – but it is unlikely to eclipse the sensational original unless a miracle of some kind occurs. Besides, after the success of the Paris Olympics, there’s general goodwill towards the French at the moment, and watching this may continue the particular entente cordiale that the past few weeks have engendered.
When The Bureau first aired on Canal+ in 2015, it focused on a fictionalised version of France’s equivalent of MI6 or the CIA, the Directorate-General for External Security, or DGSE. It is a rare treat for all but the most subtitles-averse, offering a mixture of adrenaline-pumping thrills and genuinely head-scratching moral dilemmas. Imagine a mixture of the first (and best) season of Homeland, le Carré and unusually well-informed Netflix documentary, and you’re coming close to its combination of ingredients that have made it such a critical darling.
It stars the actor-director Mathieu Kassovitz – who some will always associate with his classic 1995 urban crime picture La Haine and others with the romantic lead in the whimsical 2001 comedy Amélie – in the lead role of Guillaume Debailly, a spy coming in from the cold after spending six years in Damascus and finding it impossible to resume his previous life after being undercover for so long.
His nickname, appropriately and amusingly, in the original version of the show is “Malotru”, which can literally be translated as “Lout”. While in Damascus, he has fallen in love with Zineb Triki’s Nadia El Mansour, a Syrian academic who has returned to Paris. The usually scrupulously professional Malotru decides to resume his former undercover identity and arrange an assignation with Nadia, a seismic error that will have severe repercussions over the next five seasons.
Unusually for such a male-focused genre, many of the most interesting characters in it are female, not least Sara Giraudeau’s deep cover DGSE agent in training, Marina Loiseau. She is appropriately nicknamed ‘Phenomenon’ and the show spends as much time on following her as Kassovitz, exploring how a committed and brilliant agent could find herself drawn into a situation of enormous moral complexity and compromise, where the enemy is no longer lurking in plain sight but could be anywhere and everywhere, including on one’s own side.
Certainly the DGSE are not presented in a flattering fashion in this series. There are tense and exciting moments dotted about the show, sometimes involving explosions and shoot-outs but more often revolving around the long, slow process of following a target or potential asset via either digital technology or good old-fashioned spadework. But this is also a deeply cynical, weary show that has some fascinating points to make about the tainted legacy of French colonialism.
It is no coincidence that two of the main Middle Eastern settings for the show are Syria and Algeria, two places where the contemporary attitude towards the old values of liberté, égalité, fraternité is mixed, at best. When – spoiler alert – Kassovitz’s character becomes a double agent for the CIA, their incursion into the show merely complicates the moral quandaries the protagonists face.
Whereas in Slow Horses, we are never in doubt that, for all their apparent haplessness and slovenliness, the eponymous ‘joes’ are the good guys, there is a cynical and world-weary question at the heart of The Bureau that only seems more relevant now, in the era of heightened global conflict. Who can you trust, and are you right to do so?
If this makes the show sound slow, or humourless, then don’t worry. There is a wry sense of wit on display throughout, whether it’s the painstaking examination of what the characters’ tradecraft is and what it involves – it is all but impossible to watch this show and fancy a career in espionage, especially in the DGSE – or simply some of the drier moments of humour. The characters’ codenames being taken from Captain Haddock’s more creative insults in the Tintin books, for example, or a character’s lack of trustworthiness and general spycraft being signalled by his eating chips with a fork in the staff canteen. And although this is hardly a Mission: Impossible-esque spectacle, there’s at least one pulse-quickening scene in every episode; some of the cliffhangers rival Breaking Bad for effect.
The show was originally created by Éric Rochant, who had earlier success with his crime drama series Mafiosa, and he served as showrunner until the fifth and final season, where the acclaimed, award-winning filmmaker Jacques Audiard eventually came in to direct the divisive final episodes: a sign of how respected The Bureau was in France that it could attract such an A-list talent. According to Rochant, the original idea behind the series was to compete with acclaimed American dramas and to emulate their style of production, with a showrunner, a writers’ room and 10-episode seasons that would simultaneously cover a great deal of ground while leaving a hungry audience wanting more from the next instalment.
Given The Bureau’s many elaborate – and nasty – twists and turns, The Agency will have its work cut out to maintain the element of surprise and suspense that the original managed in such an ineffably stylish way. (They’re French, after all; of course they dress well and present themselves impeccably, even under severe personal and professional pressure.)
It remains to be seen whether the remake will attempt to take on such hot-button contemporary issues as the Israel-Palestine conflict or the Russia-Ukraine war directly or obliquely, or if it serves up more of a standard-issue geopolitical thriller in which ‘the enemy’ could be anyone or anything. Given Clooney’s involvement in such politically engaged films as Syriana and The Ides of March, let’s hope The Agency doesn’t end up being sub-Jason Bourne clandestine spy larks that have little, if any, tethering to reality.
The Bureau never went in for such an easy option, and instead depicted a world in which its flawed protagonists had to go into battle against amorphous, shifting adversaries, for little reward and even less acknowledgement. Rochant suggested in an interview that he was inspired by such events as the assassination of Jamal Khashoggi – which feeds into the ultra-cynical opening of the final season, in which Malotru is believed murdered by Russian separatists after having been hung out to dry by his own side – and the growth of cyber warfare in the Middle East. He cited everything from Succession to Miami Vice and Once Upon A Time in America as being his inspirations for the show.
As with the similarly propulsive French police drama Spiral, their combined DNA can all be seen within its endlessly watchable seasons. And if you’re reminded of everything from The Americans to the unfairly overlooked (and Butterworths-scripted) 2010 spy thriller Fair Game at points, too, then this American-accented influence is clearly intentional; while the show’s primary language is French, it embraces a polyglot range of voices that often sees characters from different nations attempt to speak in English to one another, keeping themselves at a mutual disadvantage.
Yet there is also the spectre of Alain Delon and Le Samouraï here, too – a shrugging, trench-coated existentialism that remains uniquely Gallic. A particular appeal lies in watching Kassovitz, an actor who has grown into his looks splendidly; one close-up of his face, alternately struck with sadness, longing or resolve, is richer than any number of grandstanding monologues.
So the next evening that you’re casting about for something to watch, go to Paramount+ and take a change on The Bureau. Chances are that if you start watching one episode, you’ll be halfway through the night before you finally blink and remember to switch the show off several enthralling hours later.
All five seasons of The Bureau will be on Paramount+ from August 15
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