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ill-timed spooker
CBS drama about the CIA is overtaken by events
By Elizabeth White
In show business, timing is everything, and for CBS’s "The Agency" the timing couldn’t be worse.
The Sept. 11 attacks prompted the series' creators to delete scenes, run episodes out of sequence, and rethink the obviously major role that terrorism would play in such a series.
And even with all the rejiggering, the show can't help but throw doubt into viewers’ minds about the capabilities of the CIA. Audiences for some time to come may not be up to watching a series about how government agents week after week narrowly avert threats to American citizens.
"The Agency" also faces a bumper year of spy-crime-intrigue shows to compete with, making it hard for any one series to stand out.
Further, "The Agency’s" chief competition on Thursdays at 10 p.m., "ER," seems headed for a banner year, with the return of one favorite character and the departure of another sometime this season. Last week, "ER" averaged a 29 household share, while the premiere of "The Agency" mustered a 12 share.
But "The Agency" has other problems, beyond timing and competition, and they are more fundamental.
The show is supposed to be an insider’s look at the CIA, à la "CSI" and real-life crime scene investigations. But unlike crime scene investigations, where there are few trade secrets that need to be protected, the most interesting aspects of the CIA's work are off-limits as elements of mass entertainment.
In many cases, they are simply too complicated to be unfolded neatly in a weekly television series.
The result is that "The Agency" is little more than a run-of-the-mill cloak-and-dagger drama, lacking any sense of realism.
There’s nothing particularly innovative about the investigative techniques that "The Agency" does reveal, and the only clues indicating that this show isn’t from the Cold War are that the Russians are now occasional allies and that people use Photoshop to falsify papers.
Even with these problems, the show might work if the characters were well-drawn and engaging. They are not, and it is because they, too, are hampered by realism.
In striving to come off as believable spooks, all of the main characters are cast as low-key workaholics who wear dark suits. Gil Bellows, as the operations man, is the most exciting of the bunch, and he doesn’t speak a lot.
Where there is any drama in the characters’ personal lives, it is immediately superseded by whatever international drama they’re involved in.
So it goes back to timing after all.
The show’s international drama is now either too timely or too old-fashioned, leaving "The Agency" without much to go on.
October 5, 2001 © 2001 Media Life
-Elizabeth
White is a staff writer for Media Life.
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