An initial warning: there are explicit scenes of male nudity and overt gay sex interaction in the first chapter which may be shocking or disturbing to certain people. I have found them necessary to the plot and by any means with a pornographic intention as someone has suggested here. If you feel strongly against these scenes, perhaps you should skip them, but I would still advise to see the show. It would be a pity to miss such an extraordinary miniseries on behalf of some minutes of physical love between the male characters.
***
There are many ways of setting the table for a spy story. This does it in a quite unusual, anti-Guy Ritchie, anti-Mission Impossible way.
You enter London Spy not through a frenzied mosaic of espionage clues, not through a crazy car/plane/chopper persecution set in a fancy city, not through a climactic adrenaline first scene before the title sequence.
Instead, you will be guided by a "slow motion narrative" through a deeply intimate and loving gay relationship between two strangers. The enigma is rather in the brief emotional hints than in object clues until, in the last couple of minutes in the first episode, the knot is revealed and by then you are already convinced that you are watching something really different and impressive.
The cast and all the actors are simply perfect.
Ben Whishaw brings us a one-man festival in himself, what a talented actor and what a wonderful composition! I had never seen Edward Holcroft before but I have to say he makes a perfect Alex here, as tense and hermetic as vulnerable at the same time.
Plus a great, unreadable Jim Broadbent who disturbs and intrigues you from the first scene. And Charlotte Rampling with her habitual show of performative prowess and depth.
As a bonus, it upturns several stereotypes. First, the matter of homosexuality in a spy context. Second, the fact that such homosexuality is male, and presented as a stylized, highly intimate love story. Then, the kind of intelligence at work in the deductive unveiling of the truth, which is not the usual "cold, analytic, razor-blade precise wit" in the espionage movies. Instead, we see a man equipped with traditionally female cognitive resources: emotional intelligence, insight, keen observation, intuition... This came to me as a surprise. (Kudos to Ben Whishaw)
The show is running on the air as I write this, but so far it is an alluring, impressive series whose end, I hope, will not disappoint and live up to the wonderful expectations set up in the first episodes.
