By this point in the streaming television era, we’ve seen countless shows about spies and other clandestine operators who are a little quirky—the joke being that despite the extreme nature of their work, they move and react in the same ways that boring old regular people would. So I was wary about the new series Black Doves (Netflix, December 5), which on paper promises more of the tedious, irksome same. Ben Whishaw and Keira Knightley play an assassin and a spy caught up in a London mystery, while also attending to various normal-folks personal matters. It all sounded a bit predictable.
But much to my happy surprise, creator Joe Barton has found novel ways to humanize his secret agents. On Black Doves, matters of the heart stand toe-to-toe with (and demand just as much care as) all the bloody intrigue. Characters’ idiosyncrasies, their pert humor in the face of mortal risk, are charming where so much else in the spies-with-personal-lives mini-genre feels canned.
Part of the immense appeal of Black Doves is that it centers a type of relationship rarely seen in hard-nosed thrillers. Whishaw (having a bit more fun than he got to in the morose London Spy) plays Sam, a soft-spoken gay assassin still mourning a relationship that ended years ago. Knightley is Helen, a wife and mother living a tony, well-connected life in a gorgeous townhome, but who is secretly a mole for a shadowy, extra-governmental organization. Theirs is a gay-guy-straight-girl best friendship, a common real-world dynamic that I can’t recall seeing explored in this fictional format before. Their rapport is textured and credible, the result of thoughtful, specific writing and performances.
It’s also a lark seeing these two particular actors play about with guns and martial arts. Barton’s show is bluntly violent, with death arriving quickly and regularly in offhanded, comical fashion. And yet Black Doves somehow still makes us feel the weight of many of these untimely ends, the cast of characters growing noticeably thinner as the series progresses.
Among the varied and lively array of people surrounding Sam and Helen is their mutual handler, Reed, a toughie played by the great Sarah Lancashire, here getting to enjoy a bit more elegance and haughtiness than she did on her terrific (and must-watch, if you haven’t yet) police series Happy Valley. Reed clearly has some affection for her two younger charges, but Lancashire keenly communicates her power, too. The end goal is ultimately more important than the lives of even her most cherished employees, and Black Dove sharply keeps the audience guessing about just how much danger Reed really poses to our two affable anti-heroes.
Elsewhere, Kathryn Hunter gives a winning, scratchy turn as something like an assassin talent agent, exuding both menace and fun-aunt energy. Ella Lily Hyland is a hoot as an eager young killer for hire, maybe a sociopath or maybe just a tad too insouciant. Some of these are stock characters, familiar to anyone who’s seen a John Wick movie. But Black Doves tilts these forms at interesting angles. A different kind of sensibility presides over the series—I suppose one might call it queer.
Is it terribly believable that, once some shocking information is out in the open, Sam would get even the dimmest of possible second chances with his former partner? Maybe not. Black Doves asks that everyone on the show greet murder and mayhem with almost casual acceptance. That is the series’s most only-on-TV indulgence, its vision of a world in which people so readily accept deadly espionage crashing into their lives.
Then again, there might be some truth in there. With each passing year, it’s becoming easier to buy that furtive forces are moving about, governing matters of money and security in the service of a nearly invisible oligarchy. Black Doves simply literalizes that suspicion against a warm-lit London at Christmastime; in agreeably shabby industrial spaces; at cozy gay dinner parties. Lived-in and slightly odd, Black Doves makes the spy thriller both chic and bohemian.
And, at only six episodes, it admirably requires only so much of your time. Black Doves concludes as a tastefully brief British series that I would actually like more of. Maybe in a second season, Sam and Helen could go somewhere warm for a summer holiday? A bestie road trip through Italy, say, full of suspense and the pleasant chatter of two friends who’ve known each other for a long time—and hope to keep each other alive for ever more conversation to come.
