Apple TV+'s 'Liaison' Muddies Up a Cross Channel Romantic Spy Thriller

No genre may be more saturated with diplomatic anxieties than the spy thriller, and seven years since Britain voted to leave the European Union, lots of recent series have touched on the U.K.’s new standing in the continent. It makes sense why — it’s a genre featuring international suspicion, tense border-hopping, and agents with grudges against whole nation-states. Liaison, the new Franco-British series starring Eva Green and Vincent Cassel as agents with a cross-channel history, certainly commits the hardest to the technicalities of post-breakup spy work.

However, a promising start leads to a narrative muddiness, and the central love story never burns bright enough to make us persevere. What looks like a more grown-up type of thriller (both in its romance and politics) deflates by about two-thirds into the six-episode series and never picks up again.

The plot of Liaison, helpfully surmised by Wikipedia as “A thriller following French spies and terrorists,” seems robust in concept. Two Syrian hackers flee across Europe as asylum seekers, pursued by U.K. and French governments for the intel they’ve acquired while a French private security firm makes more aggressive, sinister attempts to silence their secrets. Gabriel (Cassel) is an agent with no formal allegiance to France or its intelligence agency, the DGSE, but plenty of experience on the lawful and unlawful sides of morality. Alison (Eva Green) works for the U.K. government in security, firmly rooted in bureaucracy after a chequered radical past where she was deeply entwined with Gabriel.