When we are first introduced to Helen Webb (Keira Knightley), the protagonist of Netflix’s newest spy thriller, “Black Doves,” she dons a nice dress and perfectly coiled hair that doesn’t move an inch. The wealthy wife of Defense Minister Wallace Webb (Andrew Buchan), Helen’s life has given her a big house, two children, and a Christmas tree overflowing with presents. But Helen has a secret. She happens to be a member of the Black Doves, a private espionage organization that has no loyalty, working strictly for the highest bidder.
While her marriage began as a simple mission, her relationship with Wallace has grown into something genuine, albeit complicated. At the heart of this complication is an affair with civil servant James Davies (Andrew Koji), who at the beginning of the show’s first episode, is assassinated along with two other people. Helen’s proximity to James, and the secrets she told him, may be the reason that her employers want her back in the game. Or perhaps, there are other secrets hidden under the surface of Helen’s fractured disguise, secrets that are so big they attempt to crack the foundations of the country.
In Helen Webb, Knightley has been given the role of a lifetime, one that forces her to balance her comedic chops with her physicality. While she’s always been a significantly talented dramatic actress, it’s in “Black Doves” that she gets the space to offer audiences a performance from her that they’ve never seen. Helen is poised and sophisticated in the life she has built with her politician husband. Still, once her past comes back to haunt her, this sophistication is slowly chipped away, revealing a cracked interior bound to shatter before the season’s end. Knightley is joined by an equally fantastic Ben Whishaw, whose role as her partner in crime, Sam, is the show’s emotional tether.
He, too, is suffering under the weight of his past, namely the lover he left behind when he fled London 7 years before the series begins. It’s in Sam that the show’s emotional core can be found: stumbling over apology after apology, eyes excessively blinking tears away before they can fall. Early in the series, Helen is described as “a coiled spring, a weapon,” and it’s clear that neither she nor Sam has moved beyond this description. While they’ve gotten used to their life of espionage and murder, the secrets they have attempted to bury are adamant on rearing their heads, exposing the two characters as the fractured humans they truly are. In Helen’s case, this drives her to pursue uncovering the many mysteries at the center of the series, but with Sam, it pushes him to become even more disillusioned with the life he’s leading.
The streaming market is nearly over saturated with spy thrillers, but it’s clear that creator Joe Barton understands this. Instead of simply having Knightley and Whishaw helm a run-of-the-mill political thriller, he instead gives these actors some of the best material they’ve been given in years, allowing them to inhabit two of the most interesting characters brought to the screen this year. Both Helen and Sam—and the side characters who join them on their mission—are battling two different versions of themselves. One is a person who does what they’re told and asks no questions, and the other is a person exhausted by the system they find themselves in and are desperate to find a way out.
This is where “Black Doves” beats out all its peers—in its willingness to defy its genre and in the empathy that it grants its central characters. Although the Black Doves are a typical and often apolitical intelligence agency, the people who are a part of it are filled with a code of ethics that directly conflicts with the agenda of the organization they’re serving. Even the most spry of side characters, who enter the show with an air of psychopathy, slowly unfurl into fleshed out human beings whose depths are not reflected in their job. It makes for a thrilling series where we get to watch some great action sequences, yes, but also allows us to fall in love with these characters when they’re at their most mundane.
Within its tight six-episode run, the series never loses its wit, style and heart. From shootouts to tender admissions of love, “Black Doves” feels like a revelation in a genre that grows staler by the year. Even its most laborious storylines featuring different government agencies rushing to uncover a politician’s murder have a spark to them. Where most shows of this kind would falter under a bloated story or suffer from uninteresting characters, creator Joe Barton has created a series that feels like it’s desperate to show why it’s different. Thankfully, it delivers on this promise on all fronts and feels destined to become one of the most beloved spy thrillers of the decade, if given a second season.
Whole series screened for review. On Netflix December 5th.