Paramount’s remake of “Le Bureau des Légendes” has an almost fatal flaw.

The agencyUnfortunately I miss that I don’t know what I need from The Bureau of Legends.

If only I had seen Showtime’s new spy thriller The mid-2010s French drama known in English as has never seen its source material The office. I had no idea that something could be missing – that I don’t know what I need of the original — or that there was another way for “Martian,” Michael Fassbender’s brazen spy who came in from the cold, to be. I don’t know that the French foreign intelligence service is overall more pleasant (at least in TV dramas) than the CIA, which is so often portrayed as violent (see: lioness), bumblebees (see: The looming tower) and overly bureaucratic (see: The agencyin which several lines discuss the relatively small cost of exfiltrating a source from a bad situation, given the CIA’s multibillion-dollar budget. But the fact is that I Do knowledge. And as I go on The agency– I have seen the first three episodes – I expect to feel some of them boredom for the duration of the first season.

The American remake is almost shockingly close to the original. Joe Wright (atonement, pride and Prejudice) directed the first few episodes, and although the first episode is not a 1:1 repeat Le Bureau‘s, it’s damn close. The characters mirror each other, and the narrative elements are the same: a spy who is called back to headquarters must hastily end a romantic relationship while undercover and hide in a safe house for months before he can return to his home base to… To train new agents, he will be sent to Iran and reunited with his daughter. Meanwhile, in a parallel storyline, another undercover agent got drunk abroad, was arrested and disappeared – possibly into the arms of the enemy, where his cover might be blown. A lot is happening!

But as I watched The agency, I felt like everything was rushed; I couldn’t really identify with any of the characters, except for Jeffrey Wright’s Henry, the Martian’s boss, who constantly suffers from such problems the discomfort. To be fair, Fassbender’s Martian is really the only way I can imagine a spy played by Fassbender: distant, inscrutable, icy. I love Michael Fassbender because he is both so hot and so deeply strange – both qualities remain The agency. His Martian is only half a step away from his role as the nameless assassin in David Fincher’s Netflix film The murdererwhere he performs both vinyasa yoga sequences and murders with balletic zeal. He doesn’t kill anyone The agency (At least for now), but his nervousness is intact.

That would be fine if his French counterpart wasn’t there Le Bureau– “Malotru”, played by Mathieu Kassovitz – is the opposite: warm, soulful, deeply connected to others inside and outside the spy business and to us, the viewers. We feel his passion for and kindness towards Nadia, his forbidden love, and we are thrilled for both of them from the first moment. Everything is so, well, French! He always has red wine with him and smokes. He appears to be a father, an ex-husband and a lover. He’s someone we would know, except he’s a spy. We believe in his fundamental goodness, even if he breaks the rules everywhere. We believe that he will do everything for it l’amour fou—for Nadia and for France. We like him so much.

Maybe the creators of The agency decided that they needed to move away from Kassovitz’s portrayal in order to make their show stand out. Or maybe after Fassbender signed on, they had to make his Martian a different (read: hot and weird) guy instead of someone we’d actually like. Either way, for me there is an almost fatal flaw in the decision: the forbidden relationship between our spy and his lover lacks the actual chemistry needed to underpin so much of what is sure to come The agencygiven what’s happening in Le Bureau. This love affair has implications for global security! There is sex between Martian and Sami (Jodie Turner-Smith), an Ethiopian historian he met during his assignment in Addis Ababa. But there is no electricity. Sami can also say the words almost directly Le Bureau– “It was dangerous. It was wrong. It had no future. But I couldn’t have missed it for the world” – but it feels more routine than wistful.

I have a few other complaints, but the funniest and most pedantic concerns the fact that Richard Gere, who plays the head of the London CIA office where Martian is based, repeatedly refers to JSOC (the Joint Special Operations Command) as JSOC, when it comes to it should be pronounced as “jaysock”. Light up! And why does brooding British heartthrob Dominic West play the director of the CIA? There really wasn’t a single square-jawed American for this role? (No offense to Dominic West, but really!)

The agency premieres on Thanksgiving weekend, and what I can say is: This would be a perfectly good show to watch with relatives. It’s smart, it’s moving, there are great people in it. You may have to stop and explain things to your elderly uncle – for example, if the show suddenly takes us to Ukraine or Belarus. But you will enjoy it. And then when you have the chance temps seultry it Le Bureau. I’m grateful for that The agencyat least gave me the chance to go back there again Encore.