Black Doves, Slow Horses, The Diplomat: What’s behind the surge of thrillers set in London?

Picture this. Pierce Brosnan in a Brioni suit aboard a jet boat racing down the Thames against the backdrop of London, or Judi Dench’s M, driving across Vauxhall Bridge as the SIS Building explodes from a bomb.

The most famous fictional spy in the world is not a gung-ho American CIA agent secretly toppling regimes in Latin America or infiltrating militant groups in the Middle East. It’s obviously James Bond, he of the shaken martini diet.

In the absence of a Bond movie since 2021, and not even the hint of one on the horizon (come on, Barbara Broccoli, get it together), that appetite for the most iconic of British spy thrillers has been satiated with an intense convergence of London-based espionage stories.

Trends in TV and film are not new. Usually what happens is that there’s a stand-out title that generates either a massive box office or takes over the zeitgeist, and every studio or streamer starts hunting for their own version.

It’s why every second book in the five years after Gone Girl was a thriller with an unreliable narrator that had either the word “girl” or “woman” in the title. She was on the train, in cabin 10 or in a green dress.

The success of Big Little Lies was responsible for a raft of crime mysteries about middle-class and upper-middle-class suburban, well-dressed white women, almost all the shows either starring or was produced by Nicole Kidman or Reese Witherspoon.

In the past three months, there have been four high-profile streaming series that all feature London as the background in a spy thriller – the second season of The Diplomat, Black Doves, The Agency and The Day of the Jackal.

It’s notable that two of these (The Diplomat and The Agency) are actually American shows with CIA characters but they’re set in Old Blightly. US director Steven Soderbergh’s next film, Black Bag, out in March, is also a spy thriller based in the UK.

What’s happening here? Has Langley lost its allure? It’s true that suburban Virginia doesn’t offer the same visual panache as London with all of its landmarks, buildings and just general buzz, but it’s curious nonetheless.

It generally takes two to three years for a production to go from pitch to premiere so if we rewind about that time, what was happening then to explain why the sudden interest?

There wasn’t a catalyst project that set this off. At the time, Slow Horses, arguably the best of the current crop in this genre, had debuted its first in early 2022, but it was a series that took a few seasons to build the feverish love it now enjoys. It was a slow burn.

If you go back a little further, there was Killing Eve, the propulsive series starring Jodie Comer as a master-of-disguise assassin who engages in a cat-and-mouse game with a MI5 analyst played by Sandra Oh. But Killing Eve premiered in 2018 and by the time its final, not well-received, season finished in 2022, the shine had worn off.

In 2016, The Night Manager, a sexy thriller with Tom Hiddleston, at the time very much in demand off the back of his Marvel projects, as a former military officer who is recruited as an asset to spy on an arms dealer played by Hugh Laurie.

The Night Manager spawned another John le Carre project, The Little Drummer Girl, and will, to add to the current glut, return with a second season later this year.

Along with Ian Fleming, Le Carre, who also wrote Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, is one of the grand masters of the British spy genre. Both spent time in the intelligence services during the Second World War and used their experiences to colour in their fictionalised universes.

Much of what is happening now can be traced back to both writers’ cultural legacy.

But more than any industry trends being driven by someone’s else success, or even the vacuum created by Daniel Craig’s exit from the James Bond franchise, is what it reflects of the British social and political environment.

The Brits have been in a heightened sense of turmoil since Brexit, which really didn’t turn out how many regretful Leavers were expecting. Faced with economic challenges, some they share with everyone else in the developing world, others that are unique to their ecosystem, it’s a country plagued by uncertainty.

The political and geopolitical situation has only fuelled the flames. Russia is on the move in Europe, threatening decades of international and regional co-operation, there is a real feeling of genuine fear. Sometimes we forget how tight everything in Europe is – the distance between London and Moscow is closer than from Melbourne to Cairns.

When the Americans remade French espionage show Le Bureau into The Agency, they set it in London and shifted the Algerian subplot to Ukraine. The second season of Slow Horses kicks off with the death of a Cold War-era defector.

The stories we tell and when we tell them always reveals what we’re scared of or excited about and, right now, years of political chaos in the UK and elsewhere is coming up in all sorts of TV shows and films.

The spy thriller feeds into our general paranoia and distrust of institutions, which is why The Diplomat’s conspiracy plays on audiences easily buying the idea that a UK PM might set off a false flag operation to shore up his own power.

The British political establishment with its parade of incompetent leaders (Boris Johnson, Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak in fewer than five years) is ripe for dramatic inspiration.

But it’s also a genre in which at least one person is trying to do good, to bring about justice, to assert order from the chaos, even if their means are sometimes compromised. That’s comforting viewing.

Although what does it say then that in The Day of the Jackal, SPOILER ALERT, Lashana Lynch’s MI6 agent character is killed off with such efficiency and no fanfare?