John Hughes (Shaun Evans) has been a spy for 20 years, but a glamorous life still eludes him. Minutes after being introduced, he finds himself slumped against the entrance of a gas station, shaken and bloodied. Two bodies—an informant and a hitman who killed the informant and then lost a brutal fight to the death with John—lie beside him under a dull, gray sky.
Back at MI5 headquarters, a reprimand awaits. John's meeting with his doomed contact—promised with information about a potential foreign threat to national security—was yet another operation carried out without following proper protocol. Part of his punishment is being assigned a new partner, Mehreen (Zahra Ahmadi), sent from MI6 above John: once she takes charge of the case, her superiors want John gone. John continues his investigation nonetheless.
Directors: Tyree Dillihay, Adam Rosette
Writers: Aaron Buchsbaum, Teddy Riley, Chris Tougas
Stars: Caleb McLaughlin, Gabrielle Union, Nick Kroll
Betrayal is a spy thriller so monotonous and depressing it feels more like a police drama. John is a maverick with a troubled personal life, a hot-tempered dinosaur chasing his last remaining target before the stuffy bosses at headquarters finally manage to get him fired. Only, instead of his iconoclastic rule-breaking being used to catch local killers, John might be the only man capable of stopping Iran from carrying out a major terrorist attack.
Like all rogue detectives, John has a long-suffering wife who berates him every time he makes one of his occasional, half-hearted trips home, which never excite him as much as being out there in the field, taking down villains. Sharing John's expensive but dreary Victorian townhouse in London is a better-drawn couple than most, even if our first encounter with them is a bit of a cliché: Claire (Romola Garai) curtly calls John when he's in the middle of a stressful work fiasco to remind him that he's supposed to be at his couples therapy session.
As a GP, Claire has her own demanding and time-consuming job, but it always seems to be her who has to run the house and look after the children. Well, it's Claire and the nanny, but still: John is too absorbed in his special vocation to stoop to domestic or emotional duties, and his tactic of defusing every complaint with humor or an ethereal, affectionate goodbye lost its edge a decade ago. Garai understands this perfectly: the main emotion he conveys to Claire isn't anger, but a deep, bitter weariness. That woman is TIRED.
However, when the protagonist of a drama has an extraordinary job where lives are at stake, how raw and believable can her personal problems be? The appeal of Betrayal is that it's committed to both portraying a relationship in crisis and its spy adventures, but it's not an easy marriage. Working in an MI5 counter-terrorism unit, where staying late unexpectedly can be practically non-negotiable and keeping secrets from your partner is a legal requirement, is a profession where behaving like John is understandable, even more so than it would be if he were solving ordinary crimes. Garai's excellent performance as a jilted wife seems to belong to a completely different dramatic genre.
Betrayal attempts to square the circle by making the suspenseful part of the series bleak as well, setting the action in grimy parking garages, flat-roofed pubs, musty hostels, and high streets lined with seedy takeaways. The Ipcress File-esque, oblique camera angles accentuate the unease. Everything is as bilious and jaded as John, whose time at the office consists of a series of irritable clashes punctuated by his critiques of effeminate modernity: his comments about MI5's inadequate mental health care and his sarcastic remark that it's "deeply problematic" for someone to offer him tea without the option of almond milk are hardly well received.
Despite all that, and the arduous visits to John's wretched home, there isn't much energy left for a spy plot. Our man installs trackers, relies on sources, survives interrogations, and hacks laptops, but not in a plot with much speed or complexity. The dialogue frequently resorts to piles of exposition to fill the gaps, and the first two episodes reach their cliffhangers by the blatant shortcut of suddenly revealing key information to us—but not to John, whom we are otherwise seeing through his eyes. The twist that arrives midway is predictable because not enough has happened to create that many possibilities.
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