Recommendations: Week of 1/27/25

Winter spycraft

When one is being shot at, a good coat is an immeasurably comforting item to possess. Say you’re a spy enjoying a London Christmastime or a Cambridge maths whiz pedaling your bike in the autumn sunshine. Should you catch a chill, it would be extremely difficult to escape the shenanigans you’re about to be thrown into. I would suggest a very good tweed, a bit slouchy, perhaps owned by a grandfather to shoot grouse at some juncture.

Although the Americans continue to try, no one does spycraft or outerwear like the British. Reacher fell off a cliff in season two (not literally; that probably wouldn’t even dent the old boy), The Night Agent’s first season was so colorless and characterless I barely made it halfway through. The days of The Americans and the first few seasons of House of Cards are long behind us; Britain reigns supreme with Slow Horses and any adaptation of a Le Carre novel they should wish to produce. They are old hand at this now; they can play to the cheap seats or cultivate subtlety and even make math seem thrilling.

Prime Target (AppleTV+): Oh to be a student at Oxbridge. Life seems to smell a little more of books and tea and the graceful piling up of knowledge there. They cycle; they row. They lay their palms against those sun-warmed golden stones. They can’t play on the grass, but it does seem to be lovely grass. Even the least anglophile among our generation was raised to respond to these things because of Harry Potter. To set a spy thriller in these dreaming spires is lovely. Even as people are being gunned down or suicided in cars, the backdrop inspires perfect tranquility. To be fair to everyone involved, Prime Target’s spiritual ancestors are not just the good old Brits, but also the works of Dan Brown and whoever tried to explain physics in 3 Body Problem. In this installment, there’s a rather brilliant young man who is obsessed with prime numbers (get it, PRIME target). Apparently, the American government has been spying on academics just in case they start to get twitchy about primes, which can mess up cybersecurity and thus destroy the world. So when our hero shares his research with his mentor, thus drawing the attention of the NSA, things start to get murder-y. There’s also an archaeological dig in Baghdad with a mural of stars that is also somehow prime numbers, so there’s plenty of bonkers Indiana Jones-esque hijinks coming too. This show is very silly and very fun. It stars really good actors reciting ludicrous dialogue and will make you wish you’d been smart enough to matriculate in those hallowed halls, risk of sniper fire and all.

Black Doves (Netflix): Eternally, Kiera Knightley and Ben Whishaw are both dressed in early 19th-century garb. I know they’ve done one or two things that aren’t Pride and Prejudice or Bright Star, but indelibly, those are the performances with which I associate these two pale, thin, deeply sensitive beings. As mentioned above, they are both given nice warm British coats to see them through their modern-day adventures in Black Doves, but watching them in anything I always have the queer sensation that they’re time travelers. I don’t believe that’s canon in Black Doves, though, so let’s move on. Black Doves is about a non-governmental spy organization that places young people in positions where they can gather information and sell it to the highest bidder. Helen (Knightley) has married her mark and had twins, but she gets sloppy and has an affair with a civilian, going so far as to fall in love with him. When he is murdered, she vows vengeance, a project with which her old friend and fellow spy Sam (Whishaw) reluctantly agrees to help. Black Doves is also a very fun show, though it makes you care a lot more about its characters than Prime Target does, if we want to do some light comparison. There’s a beating heart in Doves, along with a whole lot of blood spatter. Despite the tragedy at that heart, there’s a gritty joy to be found in all this. Every fight Helen wins gives her that post-workout glow, every bad guy brought down gets her closer to revenge. It’s overall a very good time.