10 Best TV Shows Like The Asset

Seemingly out of nowhere, 2025 spy series "The Asset" is taking over Netflix's global charts. What's especially remarkable about the show's massive popularity is that it was released to almost no hype, isn't based on an existing brand or property, and doesn't star any globally famous actors. But sometimes, all it takes for something to be a hit is a combination of word of mouth, an intriguing premise, and the willingness of people to just look through the new releases of their streaming service of choice and roll the dice on something just because it catches their eye.

"The Asset" is a twisty action drama series that brings the espionage thrills that lovers of spy fiction look for. It centers around a police trainee named Tea Lind (Clara Dessau) who is recruited by PET — essentially the Danish FBI — to go deep undercover in Denmark's dangerous criminal underworld. As she forms various relationships in order to get deeper into a particular crime syndicate, Tea struggles not to feel real affection towards the people she is supposed to be taking down, which makes her job increasingly complicated and dangerous.

Once you've binged all six episodes of "The Asset," which is incredibly easy to do, you'll be left wanting more series like it. The following shows offer similar spy/espionage trappings and have a female character as either the main lead or at least one of the leads. We also made an effort to include a few other Nordic productions. 

Netflix brought Season 1 of the 2019 crime drama series "Undercover" to streaming on the same day that it made its television debut. Loosely based on real events, but with entirely fictional characters, the Belgian show follows agents Bob Lemmens (Tom Waes) and Kim de Rooij (Anna Drijver) as they go undercover as a married couple. The plan is to embed themselves into a multi-family campground that is also frequented by Ferry (Frank Lammers) and Danielle Bouman (Elise Schaap) and make friends with the Boumans, as Ferry also happens to be a powerful crime lord.

The show's three seasons take viewers on a twist-filled ride that sees the double crosses pile up as even the supposed good guys are often revealed to be anything but — and, likewise, some of the people on the criminal side prove to be among the most sympathetic. It's a great companion show to "The Asset" in the way it explores how complicated it gets when an undercover mission requires agents to get so deeply entangled in the lives of their targets. And should you enjoy "Undercover," Netflix also has a pair of prequel films and an eight-part miniseries — "Ferry," "Ferry 2," and "Ferry: The Series," respectively — that delve deeper into the history of Ferry Bouman. 

"The Night Agent" quickly found itself a fan base when it dropped in 2023, becoming a drama that Netflix viewers absolutely loved. It is suspected that there is a mole that managed to infiltrate a dangerously high level of the United States government, and it is up to FBI agent Peter Sutherland (Gabriel Basso) to sniff the traitor out. At the same time, he is also tasked with serving as the bodyguard to a cybersecurity CEO (Luciane Buchanan) after her aunt and uncle — colleagues of Peter's — are murdered with the presumption that she is next. 

As of this writing, "The Night Agent" remains in the all time top 10 most-watched shows in Netflix's history. If you're a Netflix subscriber — and given that you are looking for more shows to watch like "The Asset," that seems like a foregone conclusion — then there's a high probability you've already watched "The Night Agent." And those chances are much higher if you're a Netflix watcher who also loves spy shows. Even so, as "The Night Agent" is one of the best shows of its genre in recent years, from any streaming service, then recommending it to fans of that genre is a no brainer. 

No, this isn't the 2007 Jennifer Lopez movie of the same name, nor is it the short-lived Fox animated series. In fact, this "Bordertown" is way too good to ever be confused with such subpar title twins. An example of the genre known as Nordic noir, of which "The Asset" is also included, the 2016 Finnish TV series "Bordertown" stars Ville Virtanen as Kari Sorjonen, a detective in Finland's National Bureau of Investigation. He is relocated to what is supposed to be a less dangerous and more relaxing gig so he can help his wife recover from nearly fatal brain cancer, but it turns out to be anything but easy.

The show's creator, Miikko Oikkonen, revealed how he came up with Kari Sorjonen in an interview with UPM. "The role model for the character is the exceptionally talented British writer Daniel Tammet, who speaks 16 languages and is a maths genius with Asperger and savant syndrome. The character also resembles Sherlock Holmes, but in a more down-to-earth way." While there might not seem to be an obvious link between a spy espionage show like "The Asset" and a Sherlock Holmes-inspired detective series like "Bordertown," the fact that the two shows share the Nordic noir subgenre makes it easy to recommend one to fans of the other. 

Not all great spy shows of the 21st century have exclusively been in the realm of streaming services. Case in point — one of the best of the genre, in this century or otherwise, is "The Americans," which aired for six seasons on FX between 2013 and 2018. During that time, the show racked up an impressive 18 Emmy nominations, scooping three for acting and one for writing. Taking place during the Cold War era, it follows seemingly mild-mannered suburban American couple Philip and Elizabeth Jennings (Matthew Rhys and Kerri Russell, respectively) who are actually spies for the Russian KGB.

While it revitalized her career and is now her most well-known role apart from playing the titular character of WB drama "Felicity," a surprising fact about Russell's role in "The Americans" is that she initially had reservations about accepting it. Mostly, she didn't want to take on the time commitment that an hour-long television drama required, but found herself unable to stop thinking about the story or her character — until she eventually realized that there was a reason she couldn't shake it. And it's a good thing she did, for both her career and for fans of complex female spy roles within the genre. Unfortunately, such roles are all too often one note and tend to lean on tired femme fatale tropes, which neither Russell's Elizabeth nor Clara Dessau's Tea Lind fall into. 

Many people have wondered what happened to Sacha Baron Cohen in recent years, given that he has seemingly retired most of the characters he created that made him famous. But just because he's apparently not playing Borat, Ali G, or Bruno anymore, doesn't mean he hasn't been plenty busy doing regular acting gigs. In fact, he's been doing some stellar acting work in some really interesting — and, clearly, under the radar — projects. And one such unfairly overlooked project is the 2019 miniseries "The Spy."

Cohen plays real life Israeli spy Eli Cohen, who was posing as a Syrian businessman under the alias Kamel Amin Thabet as he infiltrated Syrian high society and gathered intel for Mossad. Of course, given the nature of what Eli Cohen was doing, a fair amount of what happens in "The Spy" — especially in depicting behind-closed-doors interactions and the like — is purely speculative, something that the show got a bit of heat for. But those creative liberties were in service of telling a compelling story of a fascinating figure, and in a setting that isn't typically explored in spy shows.

Another Nordic noir series for those that particularly like that side of "The Asset" is "Gangs of Oslo," a crime show from Norway that Netflix acquired the global streaming rights to. In its native country, the show was marketed as a high profile, high budget prestige show, and that scope and ambition is well on display in its six episodes. What's fascinating about "Gangs of Oslo," especially to those outside of its setting, is that it depicts a world of gritty, violent crime in a country that the rest of the world often assumes is a paradise full of nothing but happy, healthy, and wealthy people.

Other than the setting and the subgenre, "Gangs of Oslo" has thematic similarities to "The Asset" in that the former also revolves around a law enforcement officer living a double life of sorts. Only in this case, Moaz Ibrahim's (Emir Zamwa) second life within the criminal world isn't the result of an undercover assignment. Instead, it's down to his own past as an actual criminal, and having to now reconcile that past with his current attempts at going straight and working for the good guys — further complicated by the fact that he happens to be childhood friends with the manipulative boss of said criminal underworld, Mohammed Youssef's Rami Abdallah. In order to ensure a sense of raw authenticity, "Gangs of Oslo" was cast almost entirely using first-time actors, and that even includes the two aforementioned leads.

One thing that all of the shows on this list have in common is that, like "The Asset," they are grounded in reality. There really isn't even much in the way of fancy gadgetry that might be possible in the future but certainly isn't feasible now, a longtime staple of the spy fiction genre. But "In From the Cold" is the sole exception in that regard, as its lead is a bio-engineered Russian spy who has the ability to literally shape shift into other people. 

To be fair, despite its reality-bending sci-fi elements, a real-life event inspired the creation of "In From the Cold." So the show isn't full-on "Inception" or anything quite so fantastical. And the fact that it has a double agent female lead in Jenny Franklin/Anya Petrova (Margarita Levieva) only further justifies its inclusion among recommendations for fans of "The Asset." Only Jenny/Anya isn't an undercover officer but a former Russian spy trying to live a reformed life as a single mother in the United States who is forced to deal with her past now that the CIA has found out about it. And wouldn't you know it — there is another shape-shifting spy out there, one who Jenny/Anya is in a unique position to hunt down. 

While the beginnings of his screen acting career consisted of both film and television in almost equal measure, it didn't take long before Gary Oldman was almost exclusively a film actor. That is, when he wasn't doing live theater, of course. Oldman would do sporadic television work throughout the 1990s, but largely left it behind after playing Pontius Pilot in a 1999 made-for-TV movie called "Jesus." That is, until his grand return to the small screen with his starring role in the Apple TV+ spy thriller series "Slow Horses" in 2022.

In an exclusive interview with Looper, Oldman revealed his reasons for doing his first major television work in over 20 years. It turns out that he wasn't anti-television, and had actually been wanting to break back into it for awhile, but was just waiting for a project worthy of his time and talents. Enter "Slow Horses," in which he plays a former MI5 officer named Jackson Lamb. Jackson has been relegated to a department specifically set up for people like him, who couldn't hack it in MI5 but are just useful enough to keep around for menial, boring jobs that are beneath more capable agents. But Jackson, who is actually a lot sharper than his aloof attitude and appearance let on, soon finds himself involved in a series of serious — and dangerous — jobs.

Admittedly, there aren't a ton of correlations between "The Asset" and "Slow Horses" beyond sharing the overall spy thriller genre. But, with widespread critical acclaim and over a dozen Emmy nominations, "Slow Horses" is one of the best-reviewed spy thrillers in years, so that alone makes it an almost required inclusion on any list of recommendations for people who like spy shows. 

Our final Nordic noir recommendation comes by way of "The Bridge," the 2011 series that originally ran on television in both Sweden and Denmark but has since been brought to various streaming services in the U.S. — though not Netflix, at least not as of this writing. All four seasons of the show center around Saga Norén (Sofia Helin), a Swedish homicide detective who solves a series of crimes along an area known as Øresund Bridge, which rests on the border between Sweden and Denmark. As such, she has to partner with a Danish detective — Martin Rohde (Kim Bodnia) in Season 1 and Season 2, and Henrik Sabroe (Thure Lindhardt) in Season 3 and Season 4.

"The Bridge" was remade for several countries, with the U.S. getting its own version with the 2013 FX series of the same name. That one instead takes place in an area that straddles the border of the United States and Mexico. That version was critically acclaimed and is certainly worth a watch as well, although it didn't have the ratings to sustain itself beyond just two seasons. Admittedly, the U.S. version of "The Bridge" is likely easier to find, and will relate more to a local audience.

Still, given the spirit of the list, the original version of "The Bridge" is what you should be watching. It has more in common with "The Asset" given its Nordic setting, so that's the version we led with. The best course of action would be to watch trailers for both versions and see which one appeals to you — and which one is more accessible for you in terms of streaming options — and go from there, but the original is the one we lean towards for those looking for another show that is specifically like "The Asset."

While there are plenty of spy movies and TV shows that take place in the modern day — which includes "The Asset," of course — there is something about spy fiction set in mid-20th century England that just feels like the ideal flavor for the genre. That's why we're recommending the 2019 British TV series "Traitors" — that, and the fact that it has a female lead, which fans of "The Asset" will no doubt appreciate. The female lead in this case is Feef Symonds (Emma Appleton), a British civil servant who is enlisted by the U.S.'s Office of Strategic Services to help find and identify a Soviet spy working within its ranks.

It all seems simple enough, except that Feef is being tasked to spy on her own home country. Her naivety is taken advantage of by the American soldier (Matt Lauria's Peter McCormick) who becomes her lover and subsequently convinces her to do the job. But when he goes missing, things take an unexpectedly dangerous turn for Feef. Her situation is made all the more complicated by the various other skeletons in the closet of both her and those closest to her, things that her enemies can use against her if they are pushed to do so. Like "The Asset," there are only six episodes of "Traitors" — and, like the former, "Traitors" is an incredibly easy binge, the type of show where you'll find you've spent your entire Saturday watching it without even realizing it.