WENLEI MA: Why you should watch the French original of The Bureau before the American remake

The moment we meet Guillaume Debailly, he’s lying.

A spy for the French intelligence services, Debailly has spent six years undercover in Syria, posing as a teacher. He’s been called back to Paris and the day before he leaves, he goes to break up with his girlfriend, Nadia, a married academic.

He lies to Nadia (he tells her he’s moving to Jordan after getting a post at the French school there) but he also lies to his handler about how Nadia took the news. Nadia wasn’t raging, as Debailly told his handler.

The deceptions, half-truths and carefully calibrated misdirects are essential in an espionage thriller. The Bureau is one of the best of the genre.

The Bureau (French name: Le Bureau des Legendes) ran from 2015 to 2020 on SBS but it’s only just become available to stream in its entirety on Paramount+. It’s likely not a coincidence as Paramount has the rights to an upcoming American adaptation, The Agency.

The Yanks’ version is produced by George Clooney and his creative partner Grant Heslov and is to star Michael Fassbender, Jeffrey Wright, Richard Gere and Jodie Turner-Smith. Joe Wright (Pride & Prejudice) will direct the first two episodes while Jez and John-Henry Butterworth (Ford v Ferrari) will write all 10 episodes.

That’s an impressive line-up but it’s hard to imagine the American remake will be able to meet the bar set by the French original. So, before you plunge into The Agency, which could drop as early as later this year, get acquainted with The Bureau.

The series opens with Debailly’s (Mathieu Kassovitz, Amelie) return to Paris. It’s not an easy transition, he clearly misses the thrill of the double life and slotting back to “normal” doesn’t feel right.

He still has to change modes of transport at a designated swap point every day and he is still working for the intelligence services, but there isn’t that chase.

When Debailly handed back all of the documents of his alias, Paul Lefebvre, he held onto one, the ID card, which he stashes in an air vent in his apartment. He relents and buys a burner phone and makes contact with the one person he shouldn’t – Nadia (Zineb Triki).

She happens to be in Paris on a course and against his better judgement, Guillaume resumes his Paul identity and rendezvous with Nadia, reigniting their affair. It’s a dangerous liaison for both of them. Not only is Debailly breaking the rules, but so is Nadia, for she too has a secret.

At the same time, a French agent in Algeria, codename Cyclone, goes missing after he is arrested by the police for drink driving. This also rings alarm bells as the devoutly Muslim officer does not drink.

Has he been discovered? He has defected? Was he a double agent all along? The game is afoot to recover Cyclone and the team at the DGSE, the French equivalent of ASIS, CIA or MI6, are working the leads while dealing with the internal political fallout over the missing agent. It’s not a good look.

Debailly has also been assigned to mentor Marina (Sara Giraudeau), an agent and seismologist who is starting a long-term undercover mission with the aim of infiltrating Iran’s nuclear industry. Her commission starts in Paris at an institute where an Iranian scientist is visiting, and she must convince him to bring her back with him.

Just in that first season, there are myriad intersecting plotlines and mysteries, and The Bureau balances their competing demands with finesse.

This is a patient series that doesn’t half-arse its story and character beats. But because the writing is so good, there’s always momentum. There’s a reason for every scene, for every dialogue exchange, for every suspicious look on someone’s face.

For a show that ran for five seasons, across 50 episodes, it’s a masterclass in pacing and rewarding audiences that stick with it.

There’s depth in how it builds out its characters while also weaving the intricate web of global, but particularly European, Middle Eastern and African, geopolitics.

It’s a morally complex series that explores the grey area of its characters’ lives, work and choices, and the cost of assuming a false identity for years on end. How does that affect your personal relationships and your sense of self? There’s a therapist character, Dr Balmes (Lea Drucker), the show deploys to contextualise those questions.

While it’s been compared to Homeland and John Le Carre stories, what makes The Bureau distinct is that it always feels grounded in realism. Not that it doesn’t go for the occasional dramatic moment, there’s also the drudgery of spy work – the surveillance, the meetings, the phone calls. At times, it feels bureaucratic, and that’s not a slight.

Given the choice between overplaying it and underplaying it, The Bureau always chooses the latter. Its characters, especially Debailly, are often cyphers with a restrained poker face.

But that’s what every great spy should be.

The Bureau is streaming on Paramount+