Based on: the novel by Tom Bradby Screenplay: Tom Bradby, Jemma Kennedy Directors: James Marsh, Farren Blackburn Executive Producers: Gail Egan, Andrea Calderwood Production: Potboiler Productions, All3Media Cast: Gemma Arterton, Rafe Spall, Mark Stanley, Alex Kingston, Roger Allam, Avi Nash, Amaka Okafor, Khalid Abdalla Released: ITV1/ITVX, 27 April – 5 May 2026 (5 episodes)
The Setup
Gemma Arterton plays Kate Henderson, Head of the Russia Desk at the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS, the actual name for what’s more commonly known internationally as MI6) — to everyone outside work, a loving mother of two with an unremarkable civil service job. When an operation in Malta suggests a senior UK politician may be a Russian asset, Kate finds herself racing against both her own superiors and time itself to expose them, all while a murder investigation and a looming election close in around her, and the line between what’s true and what’s being fed to her gets harder to see with every step.
My Take
Plenty of twists and turns across the five episodes, and looking back after the reveals land, the groundwork was genuinely laid earlier — nothing feels like it was pulled from nowhere, which is more than a lot of thrillers manage. The plot holds together as a single connected story rather than padding itself out, and I’m glad they kept it to five episodes rather than stretching it further, because there wasn’t really enough plot to justify more.
Here’s my actual problem with it, though, and it’s not really Secret Service’s fault so much as an accident of what I grew up on: I was raised on Spooks — MI-5 as it was known internationally — and that show will always be my benchmark for British spy television. These five episodes never got close to a single episode of Spooks for excitement, for genuine fear, for the sense that anyone on screen was in real danger. Spooks ran for ten series and 86 episodes between 2002 and 2011, following MI5’s Section D rather than MI6/SIS specifically, and it built a reputation for being willing to genuinely shock you — characters you’d grown attached to could, and did, die suddenly and brutally, sometimes mid-episode, with none of the safety a lot of prestige TV quietly promises its leads. Secret Service, by comparison, felt considerably safer and slower-paced throughout, and it never built anything like that same sense of dread.
Taken entirely on its own terms, as a standalone watch, I enjoyed it well enough. It’s competently made, the cast — particularly Arterton and Roger Allam as “C,” the Chief of MI6 — do solid work, and the central mystery resolves in a satisfying way. I just felt it lacked the pacing and the excitement to really grip me the way the genre can when it’s firing properly. It ends clearly angling for a second series to tie up a loose thread it deliberately leaves open, and I’ll watch that if it comes along. It’s just not something I’ll be actively looking out for.
2 out of 5.
