5 TV Shows To Watch If You Like The Agency

Michael Fassbender's overlooked Paramount+ show "The Agency" is all about espionage. Well, strictly speaking, it's all about espionage and character relationships. While the strange world of Brandon "Martian" Colby (Fassbender) is very heavy on the CIA spookshow stuff that makes up his professional life after he's pulled out of an undercover assignment in Africa, the show also gives plenty of attention to his lingering love affair with Dr. Sami Zahir (Jodie Turner-Smith) and his attempt to reconnect with his estranged daughter, Poppy Cunningham (India Fowler).

it's an alluring combination of thematic elements that offers both character dynamics and spy show thrills. If you've already watched the entirety of "The Agency," though, you might be curious about whether there are any shows out there that can offer a similar TV fix. Fortunately, we here at Looper have been wondering about the exact same thing, and our look into the subject has paid dividends. The following five shows are so much like "The Agency" that a fan won't be shy of material to binge right after finishing the show.

If London-based political thrillers with terrorists, forbidden love affairs, and massive stakes are your jam, you absolutely should invest your time in "Bodyguard." The 2018 BBC thriller from Jed Mercurio has multiple similarities to "The Agency," and the fact that it's a comparatively compact six-episode miniseries means that it's a great way to have an inherently bingeable one-day watch at your disposal.

"Bodyguard" focuses on David Budd (Richard Madden), a Scottish Principal Protection Officer who's tasked with bodyguarding Home Secretary Julia Montague (Keeley Hawes) — whose policies he inherently disagrees with — from outside attacks during a turbulent political time. Unfortunately for David, someone is trying really, really hard to get at Julia, and to make things even worse, the two soon become intimately involved despite the fact that he has a family.

"Bodyguard" fits an absurd amount of twists in its six-episode run, and at the end of the day, all of its elements fit together in incredible, shocking ways that the viewer will have a hard time putting together even during a rewatch — not because they're implausible, but because they're so cleverly executed. The show is a thriller and a puzzle box all rolled up in one, and while its miniseries nature means that there likely won't be a "Bodyguard" Season 2, it has enough similarities with "The Agency" that it's an easy recommendation for fans of the Paramount+ show.

If "The Agency" speaks to you because of its focus on personal relationships, the Apple TV intelligence thriller gem "Slow Horses" should definitely be on your watch list. The Slough House misfits, led by the deceptively slovenly Jackson Lamb (Gary Oldman, who told Looper why he made the move from films to "Slow Horses"), are inherently flawed and even unlikable, but they nevertheless keep ending up in the middle of serious investigations of national importance — and more often than not, they manage to save the day.

On the surface, "Slow Horses" has its own, somewhat glacial atmosphere, but much like Jackson Lamb presents himself as an unprofessional, incapable sloth, there's an element of illusion involved. There is a noticeable undercurrent of competence and high-octane action here, which both adds to the charm of the character-focused show and further ties its atmosphere together with "The Agency," which features similar character archetypes — only in a sleeker package.

With relatively short but numerous seasons, "Slow Horses" offers plenty of bang for your buck with a steady drip-feed of new stories. The fact that actor extraordinaire Gary Oldman seems content to work on the show season after season should be more than enough to let you know how good "Slow Horses" is.

One of the main selling points of "The Agency" is its absolutely stellar cast, which includes a frankly stunning amount of talent from Michael Fassbender and Jeffrey Wright to Jodie Turner-Smith and Richard Gere. If that is your main metric for a similar spy show, you can do a lot worse than "The Night Manager."

"The Night Manager" stars Tom Hiddleston as Jonathan Pine, the titular night manager of a luxury hotel and a former military man. He becomes involved in an espionage plot led by Olivia Colman's Angela Burr, who recruits Jonathan in an effort to bring down a brutal arms dealer called Richard Roper (Hugh Laurie). These are just a few of the great many brilliant actors on the show, too. Season 1 alone will give you folks like Tom Hollander, Elizabeth Debicki, Tobias Menzies, and many others.

If you enjoyed watching Laurie play an acerbic grump on "House, M.D.," you will be thoroughly impressed by his villain turn as Richard Roper. With Hiddleston and Coleman also in reliably great form, "The Night Manager" is guaranteed to be a good time for any fan of the spy thriller genre.

The eight seasons of "Homeland" might just be the best bet for those on the lookout for shows that closely resemble "The Agency." Howard Gordon and Alex Ganza's espionage thriller series has a CIA focus that's very close to that of "The Agency," save for the fact that it tends to center around Langley instead of London. Of course, as is par for the course with the genre, the action unfolds in multiple countries and locations.

With a similarly star-studded cast as that of "The Agency," "Homeland" rolls out people like Claire Danes, F. Murray Abraham, Damian Lewis, Morena Baccarin, and Mandy Patinkin, among many others. The show has a very personal element, focusing fairly extensively on its characters' lives as well as their professional ones, which is yet another similarity between the shows. "Homeland," in many ways, is a blueprint show for the specific type of serialized agent thriller subgenre that "The Agency" represents, and in this, it's basically required viewing for any fan of the more recent series.

"The Day of the Jackal" is slightly different from the other shows on this list because it focuses on a single villain, and in fact turns him into a main character. The titular Jackal, aka Alexander Duggan (Eddie Redmayne), is a particularly talented and secretive assassin who operates at an extremely high level and performs his assassinations in imaginative and brutal ways. As the Jackal deals with the intricacies of his life, it falls on the equally driven MI6 agent Bianca Pullman (Lashana Lynch) to investigate the killer's trail.

A loose but captivating adaptation of Frederick Forsyth's novel, "The Day of the Jackal" has received great reviews and is a thoroughly entertaining crime drama with an international espionage twist. Despite the difference in the two shows' premises, both it and "The Agency" have very similar DNA when it comes to their investigative elements and the characters' struggle with their ethics. Additionally, "The Day of the Jackal" is also a very well-cast show, with the likes of Chukwudi Iwuji and Charles Dance joining Redmayne and Lynch in the fray.