2022 - 2022
Six episodes, ITVX in the UK and MGM+ in the US, dropped December 2022. Adapted from Ben Macintyre's 2014 non-fiction book A Spy Among Friends: Kim Philby and the Great Betrayal by Alexander Cary (Homeland, Lie to Me) and directed by Nick Murphy. A two-hander built for two actors, almost entirely dependent on them turning up, which they do.
The premise is small in scope and huge in implication. January 1963, Beirut. A senior MI6 officer named Nicholas Elliott has flown out to confront the man who has been his closest friend in British intelligence for thirty years. That friend is Harold "Kim" Philby, and the news Elliott is carrying is this. His friend is, and has been since the 1930s, an agent of the Soviet KGB. The most infamous mole in British history. The ringleader of the Cambridge Five. The man who fed Moscow everything British and American intelligence did in Europe through the early Cold War, and got real British agents killed doing it. The show runs across five days in a safe-flat interrogation, flashing out across the decades to show how the friendship became the betrayal.
Coming to this expecting the film version of Tinker Tailor with louder guns? Recalibrate. There are almost no guns. It is two men in a room.
The casting is the show. Damian Lewis as Elliott and Guy Pearce as Philby is one of the better actor pairings British television has put together this decade, and the script knows it. Episode after episode is structured around the rhythm of their scenes together.
Lewis plays Elliott as a man whose entire self-conception is being dismantled in real time while he tries to look imperturbable about it. The clipped officer-class restraint is doing a lot of work for him, and Lewis knows exactly when to let it crack. Pearce is harder to read, which is the point. Philby is charming. Clubbable. Old-school funny. And completely hollow underneath. Pearce plays him as a man who has been performing Kim Philby for so long the performance has eaten the person, and you keep leaning in trying to catch a flicker of whatever is actually still there. A BAFTA nomination for that work and it was the right call.
Anna Maxwell Martin walks away with the show she is not top-billed on. Her Lily Thomas is a fictional composite, an MI5 counter-investigator who has no time for the MI6 club and is quietly furious that a working-class grammar-school woman is the one left cleaning up after the old boys. Maxwell Martin plays her funny and acid and exhausted and fair. Watch the scene where she finally gets Elliott across a table from her and never raises her voice. Twelve minutes, no raised voice, and she controls every second of it.
Stephen Kunken as James Jesus Angleton, Karel Roden as Philby's Soviet handler, Adrian Edmondson as MI5's Sir Roger Hollis, and Nicholas Rowe as Anthony Blunt round out a cast who all seem to know what tone the show is in and play it.
Thomas Arnold
Guy Burgess
Anastasia Hille
Flora Solomon
Anna Maxwell Martin
Lily Thomas
Edward Baker-Duly
Ian Fleming
Guy Pearce
Kim Philby
Karel Roden
Col. Sergei Brontov
Daniel Lapaine
Donald Maclean
Nicholas Rowe
Sir Anthony Blunt
On the surface, a reconstruction of a famous interrogation that really happened. Underneath, a study in what the British intelligence establishment did to itself by refusing to believe one of its own could be what he was.
The show's sharpest move is that it refuses to flatten either half of the friendship. Philby was a traitor. He passed operational details to Moscow that got people killed, including agents Elliott himself had run. He is not a misunderstood ideologue here, he is a man whose real-world body count is treated seriously. At the same time, his friendship with Elliott was also real. They drank together for thirty years. Elliott loved him. The show sits in the appalling fact that both of those things are true at the same time, and it does not try to resolve it for you.
"He was the best of us. He was the worst of us. He was both at the same time, and that is the thing they will never be able to put in a file."
The supporting thesis, quietly, is about class. The old MI6 was a gentlemen's club in which Philby was protected because Philby was one of the boys. Lily Thomas is the future, and the future is colder and more professional and less willing to let a man off because his father was in the Service. You can watch that power shift happen through her scenes, and I think that is the thread the show is most proud of.
Nick Murphy's direction is patient. Scenes breathe. Conversations go on. The show trusts you to watch two people drink and talk without cutting away to something blowing up, which is why it rewards you. Tonally it sits somewhere between Slow Horses and The Night Manager, though less droll than the first and less glossy than the second.
The period texture is careful. 1960s Beirut, all pale linen and balcony shutters and a city that was about to stop being that kind of city. Post-war London. St James's clubs, panelled rooms, cigarette smoke, whisky on decanters. The director of photography lights interiors for mood rather than pin-sharp prestige-TV gloss, which suits the material. A lot of the show happens in low light, two faces in conversation, the rest of the frame thrown away. It looks like a memory, which is mostly what it is.
Critics were very warm on this. The Guardian, Telegraph, and Times all landed in the four-star range, with most of the praise going to Lewis, Pearce, and Maxwell Martin. Pearce's BAFTA nomination for Leading Actor in 2023 followed. MGM+ renewed the format as an anthology rather than a direct sequel, which is the correct read of what this is. Elliott and Philby's story is closed. The Cold War betrayal genre is not.
Legacy-wise, it has staked out a specific lane. Homeland was the pulpy post-9/11 paranoia spy show. The Americans was the marriage-as-cover Cold War one. The Spy was the foreign-infiltration-into-enemy-territory one. A Spy Among Friends is the slow, chambered, archival one. It is for people who liked the patience of Wolf Hall and the institutional interiority of Slow Horses, and it will sit comfortably alongside Tehran and The Night Manager on a shortlist of the best recent espionage drama. Fans of McMafia and Succession will also recognise the institutional-rot DNA, though both of those operate at a very different frequency.
I was nervous about this one going in. Spy shows about real traitors usually land one of two ways. Either they moralise at the audience or they turn the traitor into a cool antihero. A Spy Among Friends does neither. It holds the line that Philby was a man who betrayed his country and his service and his closest friend, and it holds the line that his closest friend loved him anyway, and it lets you sit with that. Not many shows would.
The format helps. Six episodes, no filler, no second season stretching the story thin, no franchise ambition visible anywhere. The two leads are operating at the top of their ranges. Maxwell Martin is scene-stealing every time she is on screen. And the show has the confidence to stay quiet.
A restrained, actor-led, grown-up piece of television that knows exactly what it is. Not a flashy entry in the genre. A permanent one.
Woke Rating: {{show:a-spy-among-friends:woke}}/5 · Current Standing: {{show:a-spy-among-friends:rank_full}}
Adrian Edmondson
Sir Roger Hollis
Damian Lewis
Nicholas Elliott
Monika Gossmann
Galina
Stephen Kunken
James Jesus Angleton