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they glow under the show’s arch, affec-
tionate gaze. Apparently, when Weaver
was offered the role, she accepted be-
fore reading the script.
The A.S.K. agents are better at mak-
ing films than they are at making money,
a problem that gives the show its through
line. The first season began with a ca-
lamity: Samuel Kerr, the agency’s founder,
who, rather un-Frenchly, had not taken
a day off in a decade, finally went on va-
cation and promptly died, leaving the
books very much out of order. (A hotel
room that Kerr kept for extramarital trysts
had been put on the company expense
account: French after all.) The agent
Mathias Barneville (Thibault de Mon-
talembert), a wily operator with a cracked
moral compass and a spectacular head of
hair, tried to buy a controlling interest in
the company, but the plan went awry
when his wife, the scheme’s financier, dis-
covered that he had spent two decades
hiding a secret daughter, Camille (Fanny
Sidney)—an ingénue from the South of
France, who, in the series’ first episode,
surprised Mathias by showing up at the
A.S.K. offices incognito and getting hired
as Andréa’s assistant.
In Season 2, a Trojan horse arrived
in the form of Hicham Janowski (As-
saad Bouab), a move-fast-and-break-
things entrepreneur. He promised the
agency solvency but, hélas!, had no re-
spect for the traditions of cinema. Hi-
cham was eventually tamed and sidelined,
but not before fathering a daughter with
his nemesis, Andréa. This was a surprise,
most of all for Andréa, a committed les-
bian. “Call My Agent!,” which features
enough illicit interoffice romance to
make an H.R. department spontaneously
combust, owes much to the broad, antic
traditions of boulevard theatre. People
are always popping up in the wrong
beds, confusing identities, slipping on
the banana peel of life. Then they pick
themselves up and head gamely off to
make more mistakes in the name of pas-
sion, professional and otherwise. The
purest relationship on the show is be-
tween the veteran agent Arlette (Lili-
ane Rovère), a tough old dame, and her
dog, Jean Gabin.
Now, in Season 4, the whole opera-
tion is teetering fatally on the brink. An-
dréa’s plan to open a new agency, hatched
with her endearing schlub of a colleague
Gabriel (Grégory Montel), has imploded.
Mathias has departed with his paramour
and former assistant Noémie (Laure
Calamy, a treasure), for a stint at a pro-
duction company, and his clients have
left, too, for A.S.K.’s detested competi-
tor, StarMédia. (Should they pursue a
deal with Netflix? Mathias and Noémie
wonder. So debasing, but so lucrative.)
And there is a new antagonist: Elise
Formain (Anne Marivin), one of Star-
Média’s top agents, a shark in hot-pink
lipstick. Elise, who has Andréa’s steel but
not her spirit, is a classic homewrecker,
which only underscores the fact that the
office, for these crazy people, has be-
come a family. So what will the agents
do, now that it’s time to pack it all in?
One of the funniest new plotlines in-
volves the young agent Hervé (Nicolas
Maury), who, accompanying a client to
an audition, finds himself cast by the di-
rector instead. Hervé dreads what his
colleagues will think when he tells them
that he’s gone over to the other side and
become an actor, one of them. When he
finally confesses the truth, the scene is
a sly pastiche of a coming out. He needn’t
have worried. More actors means more
agents. Everyone will be just fine.W
hat a relief that the United States,
which has for so long exported
itself around the world in the form of
television, has finally begun to take
an interest in TV from abroad. Lately,
friends both online and off seem to be
talking about another French show, “The
Bureau” (on Sundance Now), created
by Eric Rochant. If you have been sing-
ing the show’s praises for years, chapeau.
If you haven’t yet seen it, stop reading
and go watch; it’s that good.
“The Bureau,” too, deals with the fierce
bonds of office life and the seductive
thrills of acting, though it concerns per-
formance of a very different kind. The
show’s title refers to the bureau des lé
gendes—a fictional undercover operation
run by France’s foreign-intelligence ser-
vice, the D.G.S.E. At the show’s start,
Guillaume Debailly, an agent with the
code name Malotru (Mathieu Kassovitz),
has just returned home from a mission
to Syria, where he lived, for six years, as
a French teacher called Paul Lefebvre,
gathering information and making con-
tacts under the eye of Bashar al-Assad’s
regime. But Guillaume discovers that it’s
not so easy to break character, especiallyonce his lover from Damascus, the his-
torian Nadia El Mansour (Zineb Triki),
arrives in Paris to attend secret talks be-
tween the Syrian government and the
opposition. At great cost to his colleagues,
and to his country (let this serve as a re-
minder that one should keep a healthy
distance from the C.I.A.), Guillaume
clings to the fiction of being Paul—
though who’s to say at what point a role,
played with total conviction, crosses over
and becomes the truth?
Following in the tradition of John
le Carré, “The Bureau” succeeds both as
an exemplary spy drama and as a cri-
tique of the same: it detonates the genre
from within. We are taken, among other
places, to Iran, where an operation to
scope out nuclear progress is under way;
to a brutal ISIS encampment; and to Mos-
cow, where hackers do their hacking and
the Cold War rivalries are alive and well.
Our palms sweat; our hearts pound. And,
like Guillaume, we fall in love—with
him (Kassovitz, taut as a strung bow, is
perfect in the role), and with his col-
leagues at the dingy, half-lit offices of
the D.G.S.E., the smart, dedicated peo-
ple who have to clean up his mess. But
are the bureau’s missions crucial to global
security, or does all this elaborate play-
acting merely give the agents the chance
to be part of the drama somewhere else?
Le Carré gave us a West that, with-
out an ideology to guide it, had lost its
ideals. The France of “The Bureau,”
meanwhile, doesn’t entirely understand
the force of the ideology that it’s up
against. One of the show’s strongest
plots deals with the bureau’s attempts
to track down radicalized French citi-
zens who have gone abroad to fight for
ISIS before they return to sow terror at
home. There is a kind of grim revulsion
among the older guard—how can French
people do this? (The ugly question
goes unasked: How can these people be
French?) A sting is arranged. Pretend-
ing to be a lawyer, the agent Raymond
Sisteron ( Jonathan Zaccaï) offers to
help the desperate sister of a jihadist in
the hope that she will lead him to her
brother in Iraq. The woman is a nurse,
a pious Muslim and a caring soul. Sis-
teron likes her; he thinks he can win
her trust. It never occurs to him that
she has spent her own life forced to wear
a mask, and is only waiting for the chance
to take it off.