A Spy Among Friends review: all-star adaptation of Ben Macintyre’s bestseller
Guy Pearce and Damian Lewis star in an ‘espionage stew’ on ITVX
The story of the notorious MI6 agent and Soviet spy Kim Philby has been told before, but A Spy Among Friends (ITVX) has “a fresh bash at it”, with mixed results, said Rebecca Nicholson in The Guardian. Adapted from the 2015 book by Ben Macintyre, the drama opens with the “big reveal” that Philby (Guy Pearce) has been feeding intel to the KGB for the past 20 years. His close friend and fellow agent Nicholas Elliott (Damian Lewis) is despatched to Beirut to retrieve Philby and extract a confession; at which point the drama becomes “a sort of espionage stew”, hopping between times and locations in a way that isn’t entirely satisfactory.
The drama has all the “atmosphere, period detail and clipped dialogue” you could hope for, said Nick Curtis in the Evening Standard; but the script is rather clunky, with some points laid on with a trowel. There are “heavy hints”, for instance, that Elliott is secretly besotted with Philby – which has the unfortunate effect of plastering “another layer of repression” onto Lewis’s “already buttoned-up performance”; and Anna Maxwell Martin does little to brighten proceedings as a “relentlessly stony” fictional character.
I wasn’t expecting to like this “big-dick, big-money all-star drama”, said Camilla Long in The Sunday Times. But it won me over. “At first it looks like one of those period dramas where everyone just honks at each other about ‘Cambridge’.” But “slowly, surely, it morphs into a stylish, moreish and brilliant, if understated show”.
The Week
Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.
Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
A free daily email with the biggest news stories of the day – and the best features from TheWeek.com
-
The ‘menopause gold rush’Under the Radar Women vulnerable to misinformation and marketing of ‘unregulated’ products
-
Voting Rights Act: SCOTUS’s pivotal decisionFeature A Supreme Court ruling against the Voting Rights Act could allow Republicans to redraw districts and solidify control of the House
-
No Kings rally: What did it achieve?Feature The latest ‘No Kings’ march has become the largest protest in U.S. history
-
Roasted squash and apple soup recipeThe Week Recommends Autumnal soup is full of warming and hearty flavours
-
6 well-crafted log homesFeature Featuring a floor-to-ceiling rock fireplace in Montana and a Tulikivi stove in New York
-
Film reviews: A House of Dynamite, After the Hunt, and It Was Just an AccidentFeature A nuclear missile bears down on a U.S. city, a sexual misconduct allegation rocks an elite university campus, and a victim of government terror pursues vengeance
-
Book reviews: ‘Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife’ and ‘Make Me Commissioner: I Know What’s Wrong With Baseball and How to Fix It’Feature Gertrude Stein’s untold story and Jane Leavy’s playbook on how to save baseball
-
Rachel Ruysch: Nature Into ArtFeature Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, through Dec. 7
-
Music reviews: Olivia Dean, Madi Diaz, and Hannah FrancesFeature “The Art of Loving,” “Fatal Optimist,” and “Nested in Tangles”
-
Gilbert King’s 6 favorite books about the search for justiceFeature The journalist recommends works by Bryan Stevenson, David Grann, and more
-
Ready for the apocalypseFeature As anxiety rises about the state of the world, the ranks of preppers are growing—and changing.