In Canada: Wednesdays, 9pm, CBC In the UK: Not yet acquired
If there’s one thing Canadians can’t seem to get enough of, it seems to be spy shows. Whether it’s as a stupid comedy (Insecurity), a reasonably smart cross-border politicking drama (The Border), or as a very smart undercover cop show (Intelligence), sneakiness and lies have been a mainstay of Canada’s TV output for the best part of a decade.
In part, that’s down to Chris Haddock, the Canadian writer/producer behind cop shows Da Vinci’s Inquest, Da Vinci’s Town Hall and CBS’s The Handler, who first launched the genre in Canada with the slow-moving Intelligence. He’s now back in the game with The Romeo Section, an even slower-moving spy show.
It stars the inexplicably Glaswegian Andrew Airlie as the equally inexplicably named Wolfgang McGee, a globe-trotting Vancouver university professor who runs ‘the Romeo Section’ – a group of male and female undercover spies involved in sexy time with various intelligence targets, international and domestic. It’s their job to inflitrate the Triads, crime rings, cartels and other criminal groups, to get the information Canada needs to destroy them.
To get them to do this, Airlie goes around Hong Kong and Vancouver, visiting shops, libraries, dark gloomy places, racetracks and numerous other places, where he has mumbly, Glaswegian-accented conversations with people that are so arch, you can’t tell if it’s bad writing or some kind of spy code. Then he goes away again, information gathered, so he can brood back in his office or mumble with his handler (Eugene Lipinski from Intelligence, Da Vinci’s Town Hall et al, but also the original BBC Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy), while his assets go off and have more sexy times. Main asset is the conflicted and bearded Juan Riedinger (Narcos), who spends a lot of his time shagging mental mob wife Stephanie Bennett (UnREAL, iZombie).
The whole show has the veneer of quality and intelligence, except it’s one of those veneers where you assume that it’s good and intelligent because nothing much happens for great long chunks of time and no one talks above a whisper, not because it’s telling you anything you don’t know or because of the gripping plot and characters. Not by a long chalk is this another Rubicon. You want it to be Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, but I’m about 90% sure it’s actually A Bit of Fry & Laurie.
It’s not badly written, it does avoid the excesses of a lot of spy shows, it does have some smarts to it and I’m sure it’ll have its proponents and fans, who’ll be addicted by episode eight, when something might actually have happened. But I won’t be sticking around until then, I’m afraid.
