Brian Cox is Daddy
A review of a TV show that isn't Succession
I recently stumbled upon an article published by The Guardian earlier this year that made an astonishingly bold proclamation: the best hour of TV is the fourth episode of The Game.
I’m guessing you’ve never heard of The Game before. Don’t worry, I hadn’t either. And that’s coming from someone who makes it a point to watch British television. But I bet you already knew that given my repeated mentions of Slow Horses (which I can assure you is very British despite me linking it—almost irrevocably at this point—to the Italian Grand Prix). At first, I was tempted to dismiss this claim. But after stumbling across several more articles recommending The Game as a show Slow Horses fans would enjoy, I decided to check it out.
The plot of The Game summed up in an elevator pitch goes something like this: a Soviet sleeper agent approaches MI5 with information about a plot nicknamed “Operation Glass.” MI5 assembles a top secret team to uncover and stop the operation. The sister agency south of the Thames makes an appearance (you know, the one with agents notorious for crashing Aston Martins). The “cousins” from across the pond are mentioned too. And Brian Cox is Daddy. No, this isn’t Succession. No, I don’t mean it like that. He’s just called that in the show as the head of MI5. And no, it doesn’t get less jarring the more you hear it.
If you’re a fan of John le Carré, much of the plot and tone will feel familiar. Like any le Carré classic, The Game portrays a dark and grim world of espionage. The story also eventually centers around a mole in the agency, which is par for the course given British intelligence during the Cold War had the impermeability of Swiss cheese. In many ways, The Game feels like an attempt to bring a spy thriller with le Carré-esque underpinnings into the 21st century. The results are rather mixed.
The biggest strength of The Game lies in its direction. The series is beautifully shot, but there’s more beneath the surface than just establishing the tone. Showing rather than telling is key to making a spy story great, and The Game uses its advantage as a TV show to do exactly that. At one point, a potential suspect tells the MI5 team she first caught on to them tailing her because the book being held by their agent didn’t have a spine crease despite him claiming to have read the book. This detail, while small, had been highlighted earlier in the episode with a close-up of the book’s spine. While the importance of that shot may have been unclear in the moment, the subsequent reveal offers the eureka moment that makes this kind of story satisfying: you realize the clues were right in front of you all along.
With that being said, it’s a shame the other parts of the show don’t always live up to the promise of the direction. Part of the beauty of a spy story is the emphasis on subtext. In a genre that is all about secrets and the people who keep and uncover them, what is purposefully left unsaid is often just as important as what is said, if not more. But The Game struggles to strike the right balance in this regard, and there are too many times throughout the series where the dialogue becomes heavy-handed. In the first episode, Daddy reveals to an agent he fabricated parts of their file in order to gain their unwavering future loyalty. It’s a moment that subtext could have explained perfectly well. After all, why else would the head of MI5 need to go out of his way to write up a fictional backstory on an agent? But instead of letting the reason reveal itself in a moment of silent understanding between the two, Daddy more or less straight up says it out loud. It’s not only unbecoming of a spy thriller, but also unbecoming of Daddy as a character. Would any spy, let alone the head of a national intelligence agency, ever reveal such a thing outright?
You could argue The Game is making these sacrifices to make the series more palatable to a wider audience. It would fit with some of the other choices the show makes. Joe (played by Tom Hughes) looks more Burberry ad campaign star than elite MI5 agent. He’s certainly no Sir Alec Guinness (Obi-Wan for those looking to put a face to the name) in the BBC’s 1979 adaptation of Tinker Tailor Solider Spy. That adaptation was le Carré’s personal favorite of all the adaptations of his work, and I’m bringing it up here because it’s noticeable how different that show and The Game are despite both taking place within a grim 1970s world dominated by the anxiety of the Cold War. As an overall spy thriller, Tinker Tailor Solider Spy is far superior, both in terms of the specific story itself and its wider comments on the cynicism of the Cold War and espionage. But if you’re used to watching spies sleep with anything that moves and crash expensive supercars I wouldn’t be surprised if you found George Smiley’s masterclass in wiping a pair of glasses downright agonizing. You also probably wouldn’t appreciate Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy’s portrayal of spies as pawns operating in the shadows in a bleak game of geopolitical chess.
In contrast, The Game’s attempts to inject both action and personality are clearly geared towards viewers who prefer thinking of spies as suave, sparkling heroes saving the dark world in a blaze of glory. There’s a world in which its attempts could have worked, but there are a few too many unforced errors here. Joe’s daddy issues, not to be confused in this case with capital D Daddy issues (see why you don’t just name a character Daddy?), are suddenly revealed in the final stages of the series, and since the rest of the story needs to wrap up there’s no further discussion of it immediately after it’s been dumped upon you. And there’s no way the flurry of action at the end of the final episode could have all happened within the time it took a car to travel what I’m kindly estimating to be at most a few blocks. The feeling after the show ends is that it could’ve done with an extra episode for developments like these to land rather than crash land.
Does all of this mean The Game is outright bad? No. The story surrounding Operation Glass is engaging enough to keep your attention for all six episodes. The plot twists and resolution aren’t groundbreaking (especially if you’re familiar with the spy genre and know what to look for), but they’re also not ridiculously off-putting. None of the episodes would qualify as the worst hour of TV ever.
But the best hour of TV ever? Definitely not.