5 Best TV Shows Like The Agency to Watch Next

Michael Fassbender’s underrated Paramount+ series “The Agency” is, on one level, a sleek espionage drama. But its real pull comes from the way it blends spycraft with emotional fallout. Fassbender plays Brandon “Martian” Colby, a CIA operative dragged back from an undercover assignment in Africa and forced to navigate the professional dangers of intelligence work alongside the unresolved pieces of his personal life — including his complicated romance with Dr. Sami Zahir (Jodie Turner-Smith) and his fragile attempt to rebuild a bond with his estranged daughter, Poppy Cunningham (India Fowler).

That mix of covert operations, high-stakes tension, and messy human connections is what makes “The Agency” so easy to get hooked on. If you’ve already made your way through the series and are looking for another show with a similar blend of intrigue and character drama, there are several smart options worth adding to your queue. These picks should help fill the gap once Fassbender’s world of secrets, loyalties, and betrayals has run its course.

For viewers drawn to political thrillers packed with terrorist threats, forbidden relationships, and life-or-death consequences, “Bodyguard” is an obvious next stop. Created by Jed Mercurio, the 2018 BBC miniseries shares plenty of DNA with “The Agency,” especially in the way it uses personal conflict to heighten the danger of its larger conspiracy. At just six episodes, it is also tightly paced enough to make for a gripping one-day binge.

“Bodyguard” centers on David Budd (Richard Madden), a Scottish Principal Protection Officer assigned to protect Home Secretary Julia Montague (Keeley Hawes) during a volatile political moment. The assignment is complicated from the start: David fundamentally opposes Julia’s policies, yet he is expected to keep her safe as threats around her intensify. The situation grows even more combustible when the two become romantically involved, despite David’s strained family life.

What makes “Bodyguard” so effective is how much it manages to pack into its short run without feeling overstuffed. The twists arrive quickly, but they are carefully constructed, paying off in ways that are both shocking and believable. Like “The Agency,” it works as both a tense thriller and a character-driven puzzle, and while its miniseries format makes a second season unlikely, its similarities to the Paramount+ drama make it an easy recommendation.

If the relationship dynamics and character work in “The Agency” are what grabbed you most, Apple TV+’s “Slow Horses” deserves a spot near the top of your list. The series follows the disgraced MI5 agents of Slough House, a dumping ground for intelligence officers who have made career-ending mistakes. Leading them is Jackson Lamb (Gary Oldman), a brilliant but deliberately repellent spymaster whose slovenly appearance and abrasive behavior hide a much sharper operator than he wants anyone to believe.

At first glance, “Slow Horses” moves with a scruffier, more sardonic energy than “The Agency,” but beneath that rough exterior is a highly capable spy thriller. The agents may be flawed, resentful, and occasionally hard to like, yet they repeatedly find themselves at the center of investigations with national consequences. That tension between damaged personalities and serious intelligence work gives the show a character-first appeal that fans of “The Agency” should recognize, even if the presentation is less polished and more darkly comic.

With multiple compact seasons already available, “Slow Horses” offers a satisfying amount of material without demanding an overwhelming commitment. Its steady stream of new cases, sharp writing, and Oldman’s committed performance have helped turn it into one of the most reliable modern spy shows on television. If you want espionage with bite, humor, and a deep bench of complicated characters, it is well worth the watch.

One of the main selling points of “The Agency” is its absolutely stellar cast, which includes a frankly stunning amount of talent from Michael Fassbender and Jeffrey Wright to Jodie Turner-Smith and Richard Gere. If that is your main metric for a similar spy show, you can do a lot worse than “The Night Manager.”

“The Night Manager” stars Tom Hiddleston as Jonathan Pine, the titular night manager of a luxury hotel and a former military man. He becomes involved in an espionage plot led by Olivia Colman’s Angela Burr, who recruits Jonathan in an effort to bring down a brutal arms dealer called Richard Roper (Hugh Laurie). These are just a few of the great many brilliant actors on the show, too. Season 1 alone will give you folks like Tom Hollander, Elizabeth Debicki, Tobias Menzies, and many others.

If you enjoyed watching Laurie play an acerbic grump on “House, M.D.,” you will be thoroughly impressed by his villain turn as Richard Roper. With Hiddleston and Coleman also in reliably great form, “The Night Manager” is guaranteed to be a good time for any fan of the spy thriller genre.

The eight seasons of “Homeland” might just be the best bet for those on the lookout for shows that closely resemble “The Agency.” Howard Gordon and Alex Ganza’s espionage thriller series has a CIA focus that’s very close to that of “The Agency,” save for the fact that it tends to center around Langley instead of London. Of course, as is par for the course with the genre, the action unfolds in multiple countries and locations.

With a similarly star-studded cast as that of “The Agency,” “Homeland” rolls out people like Claire Danes, F. Murray Abraham, Damian Lewis, Morena Baccarin, and Mandy Patinkin, among many others. The show has a very personal element, focusing fairly extensively on its characters’ lives as well as their professional ones, which is yet another similarity between the shows. “Homeland,” in many ways, is a blueprint show for the specific type of serialized agent thriller subgenre that “The Agency” represents, and in this, it’s basically required viewing for any fan of the more recent series.

“The Day of the Jackal” is slightly different from the other shows on this list because it focuses on a single villain, and in fact turns him into a main character. The titular Jackal, aka Alexander Duggan (Eddie Redmayne), is a particularly talented and secretive assassin who operates at an extremely high level and performs his assassinations in imaginative and brutal ways. As the Jackal deals with the intricacies of his life, it falls on the equally driven MI6 agent Bianca Pullman (Lashana Lynch) to investigate the killer’s trail.

A loose but captivating adaptation of Frederick Forsyth’s novel, “The Day of the Jackal” has received great reviews and is a thoroughly entertaining crime drama with an international espionage twist. Despite the difference in the two shows’ premises, both it and “The Agency” have very similar DNA when it comes to their investigative elements and the characters’ struggle with their ethics. Additionally, “The Day of the Jackal” is also a very well-cast show, with the likes of Chukwudi Iwuji and Charles Dance joining Redmayne and Lynch in the fray.