If you’re a fan ofJames Bond, it’s sometimes difficult to find TV series that have its spirit, with globe-trotting locations, sexy parties to ask for unique cocktails, and a deadly line of work. Here are 10 spy TV shows to watch if you love theJames Bondmovies.
10The Recruit
The Recruitis the newest show on the list, andit has revitalized the spy genre. It stars Noah Centineo as Owen Hendricks, a CIA lawyer who, all of a sudden, is on covert missions trying to not get himself killed. The show has action, but also some heart and fun with the assignment, making Owen learn on the job as fast as possible, as it’s an office where you kill or get killed (literally).
The character gets intertwined with a CIA asset (and killer) named Max (Laura Haddock), and the more he sees and learns, it gets much more confusing to know who are really the good guys. It’s a fun show, easily binge-able, and will scratch your James Bond itch.
Archeris an animated comedy about a strange spy agency (ISIS) and its lead spy, Archer (voiced by H. Jon Benjamin), a narcissistic agent who makes James Bond look like Mother Theresa. The show has a strange office sitcom vibe, where everyone at ISIS is as weird as possible, starting with Archer’s mom, Mallory (voiced by Jessica Walter, until she passed away), also a spy, who enjoys deflating her son as much as possible.
With as many jokes per second as the best30 Rockseasons, and many, many inside jokes, this show is a different way to look at the spy life.
8The Night Manager
The Night Managerwas the show that proved Tom Hiddleston could be James Bond. In this role, he’s as suave as they come, while also showing his action chops, and how he knows how to flirt with the best of them. His character, Jonathan Pine, is tasked with getting closer to arms dealer Richard Roper (Hugh Laurie).
While doing the assignment, things keep getting more and more complicated, and not only because Pine starts a fling with Roper’s girlfriend Jed (Elizabeth Debicki). Based on a John le Carré novel, the show keeps surprising its viewers with each new episode.
Related:The Night Manager: Why You Should be Watching the Prime Video Mystery Series
7The Lazarus Project
The Lazarus Projectis a unique show, as it’s both a spy series and a traveling-in-time show, written by non-other than Joe Barton (ofGiri/Hagifame). George (Paapa Essiedu) is a hacker with a wife and a kid on the way when a pandemic starts, and she’s dying. All of a sudden, he wakes up, and it’s set months before, the day they got engaged, and he remembers what has happened. He’s then recruited by an organization that can prevent mass extinction events by resetting the timeline.
Although that’s the plot, the story is much more about these spies, and how they interact knowing that they could go back months at a time if something happens, creating a strange point of view for each of them that has unprecedented consequences. About the show,Paapa Essiedu told Rolling Stone: “I didn’t want to repeat something I’d done before. I was really taken by the ambition of the storytelling.”
What if the guy at Best Buy became a spy? That was the premise for the comedyChuck, where the aforementioned Chuck received a mail from a friend and got all the CIA and NSA intelligence in his brain before it was deleted, so he became an asset for both agencies, protected by Sarah (Yvonne Strahovski) and John (Adam Baldwin). It was Zachary Levi’s first lead role, andfans ofShazam!should check out the series, as the actor has the same sense of wonder and having fun in both.
The show was always in the bubble, and yet it got renewed many times at the last second because of its loyal fans. It was deserved, as each season got better and better, making the slacker Chuck into a real asset and spy.
24was incredibly innovative when it debuted, especially because of its format of displaying each episode “in real time”. Its politics haven’t aged very well, but Jack Bauer’s (Kiefer Sutherland in his best role ever) exasperation while trying to save the world over, and over, and over again was fun to watch.
The series was also much more campy than most remember, as between action scenes, and Bauer’s talking to tech genius Chloe (Mary Lynn Rajskub), there was also a time when his daughter, Kim (Elisha Cuthbert), was followed by a Puma in the Los Angeles woods. This TV series was the first to show how thrilling a spy show could be with TV money if it was made with great ideas, a killer lead, and characters who would always end up becoming the mole in the CTU.
4Slow Horses
Slow Horsesis based on a series of novels by Mick Herron with a different spy point of view than most: what happens to those MI5 agents who have screwed up so big, but cannot be fired? They send them to Slough House, the most boring administrative place possible.
There aremany reasons to watch the show, but one of its best is the premise, as these people are the anti-James Bond, starting with its boss, Jackson Lamb (Gary Oldman). The show already has two seasons released and was renewed for two more, so it might be the perfect time to start watching it.
3The Bureau
The Bureaumight be the TV series that better reflects what being an actual spy in the real world is. The French show about the DGSE (France’s CIA) has intelligence officer Guillaume Debailly (Mathieu Kassovitz) as the lead, showing the moment he comes back to Paris after six years undercover in Syria.
The series doesn’t have the glamour and action scenes of other series on the list, but it knows how to create tension and up the stakes in moments that on other spy shows they wouldn’t even discuss (kind of like whenBreaking Badspent one of their first episodes showing how difficult it was to dispose of a body, while most crime shows wouldn’t).
The French series also shows some other funny insights, like the fact that even in a spy agency, there’s a lot of office politics involved to get things done and get to the department you want to. The show was so unique, that there’s an American adaptation on the way, directed by George Clooney.
Aliastells the story of Sydney Bristow (Jennifer Garner), a college student who has a double life as a spy. The pilot was one of the best when it was released, and shows how she discovers she’s been working for the enemy (SD6) when they kill her fiancée, and she decides to become a double agent for the CIA with the help of her estranged father, who is also a double agent. This series is what made Garner an action star for a while, and where every episode was pure adrenaline. Its first season is still one of the best and was also where most people first met Bradley Cooper, who played the friend with a crush on Sydney that didn’t know what she was really up to at work.
Created by J.J. Abrams before he was THE J.J. Abrams, during the mid-seasons, the show got a bit bogged down by the myth of Rambaldi, but it was still fun to watch Sydney juggle her triple life (college, CIA, SD6), while also kicking ass all over the world.
About Rambaldi, executive producerJeff Pinkner told TV Line: “There was definitely a time somewhere around the middle of the show where the mythology of the Rambaldi device and the plot mechanics started to overwhelm the character telling. We identified that and course-corrected and made the last season-and-a-half, two seasons, back to what the bulk of the story was about: emotion and character, with the plot servicing that rather than the other way around.”
Related:These Are the Best J.J. Abrams Shows and Movies, Ranked
1The Americans
The Americansis one of the best TV series of the last 15 years, mixing espionage, action, and bad wigs with relationship and family drama. A suburban married couple, Elizabeth (Keri Russell) and Philip Jennings (Matthew Rhys), in 1980s Virginia are KGB agents trying to help mother Russia from inside the United States, and their neighbor and Philip’s best friend, Stan (Noah Emmerich) is an FBI agent following possible Russian spies.
The show is a great exploration of marriage, falling in love again, and what one can do for their country; but also their family, and much more, while also showing all the grey situations the characters are mixed with, for Russia and the USA, everything is black and white, but for them, it’s much, much, different and confusing. It also has three incredible central performances by Russell, Rhys, and Emmerich. The show kept rising the consequences for the characters and their actions, never more than itsfinale, making the series perfect.
