Netflix UK TV review: Treason
Review Overview
Cast
8Plausibility
6Ivan Radford | On 26, Dec 2022
Tom Hiddleston, James Norton, Noah Centineo, Damien Lewis, Sam Riley, Jack Lowden. While the hunt for the next big screen Bond may still be a topic for debate, the small screen has given us no end of viable contenders for a spy to root for. In Netflix’s Treason, Charlie Cox becomes a welcome addition to the pack.
He plays Adam, the second in command at the Secret Intelligence Service. When his boss (Ciarán Hinds) is incapacitated, Adam has to step up to the plate and take over the top job. Which wouldn’t be a problem if Adam wasn’t such a soft, fuzzy bloke with a heart of gold. We first meet him, in an inspired move, giving a cheerful talk to a primary school class about what being a spy is like – and from there on in, he’s dragged into a web of conspiracies and twists that’s far from child’s play.
The person behind the attack on his boss quickly turns out to be Kara (Olga Kurylenko), a former Russian agent – and a former flame of Adam’s. And, we learn soon after that, she poisoned him so that Adam would end up in a seat of power, so she can use him to access classified information.
All this might be standard spycraft were it not for the fact that Adam is such a nice, not-007 guy – he’s happily married to Maddy (Oona Chaplin) and has two kids from a previous marriage, Callum (Samuel Leakey) and Ella (Beau Gadsdon). The first slice of tension comes from Maddy noticing that Adam is acting strangely – and her just happening to be friends with CIA agent Dede (Tracy Ifeachor), who has noticed that Adam’s career trajectory is a bit more vertiginous than normal. At what point would you believe that your partner has been compromised by another country’s secret service? And what would you do about it?
But the real kicker is that fact that Adam really does start to behave differently, and the fun comes from watching that change in motion. Charlie Cox has already cemented his action credentials in Daredevil and he doesn’t disappoint here, balancing blockbusting chops with a charmingly earnest and warm heart. The more his family get brought into the mess, the more we see Cox’s conflicted good guy compromise his noble morals, and the question isn’t just whether Maddy will notice but how far exactly Adam will go. The plotting might not be the most plausible or intelligent, but the opportunity to watch Cox sink his teeth into an interesting, atypical spy makes you wish he was in the running for James Bond – and glad that he’s doing this instead.