'Black Doves' Is a Holiday Spy Thriller for the Whole Family

It’s a shame that Black Doves couldn’t fit into Netflix’s pre-Thanksgiving schedule because the six episodes of its first season are tailor-made for intergenerational holiday weekend viewing. Another entry in the venerable Bullets & Banter subgenre of espionage thrillers, Joe Barton’s (The Lazarus Project) latest series manages to meet, exceed, and subvert expectations with many twisty turns. It gives us six episodes full of Grand Guignol violence, tempered by unexpectedly tender moments and leavened by pitch-black, desert-dry humor. 

Final-scene cliffhangers in each episode keep the momentum strong, eliciting the classic “Oh, why not, let’s watch another” response every streamer dreams of. All that would merit a solid recommendation as it is, but Black Doves is about 25% better than it needs to be and has already been renewed for Season 2, placing it above other quippy, espionage-focused political thrillers. Black Doves’s abundance of elements does not make an unholy mess of the series’s narrative coherence. Instead, Barton harmonizes and strengthens each part, starting with lead actors Keira Knightley(!), Ben Whishaw(!!), and Sarah Lancashire(!!!). 

Each likely elicits a “Wow, I didn’t expect to see any of them in a spy thriller!” But what a pleasure to watch actors best known for playing historical/literary figures doing a series with close-up knife work, guns galore, and the frosty application of international relations. (Elizabeth Bennett fending off a hitman’s attempt to corner her at home! Paddington Bear doling out much more than the Hard Stare! Julia Child, taking a break from sublime soufflés to prevent international incidents from erupting into war and making a profane amount of money in the bargain!)

Let’s back up a little. The premise of Black Doves will be familiar to fans of espionage thrillers: Helen Webb (Knightley), a highly skilled, long-serving operative, begins to crack under the weight of her responsibilities to a shadowy organization called the Black Doves. They have no allegiance to any particular nation, functioning strictly as information brokers, always selling to the highest bidder. Her rather frosty handler, Reed (Lancashire), calls in Helen’s friend Sam (Whishaw), a retired hitman who flies in from Rome to give Helen support. 

The cracks start with Helen’s longstanding existential crisis. Her name is Daisy; she’s been working solo on a deep cover assignment for a decade. With only her memories and Reed as tethers to who she was before honey-trapping a young member of parliament, she no longer knows where Helen ends and her prior self begins. Her first assignment, Wallace Webb (Andrew Buchan), now UK’s Defence Minister, has become an enduring marriage with adorable twins, a beautiful house, and a lively social life. Helen loves her family but often feels alone in a crowd, while Reed only values Helen for her highly profitable intel.

Helen’s disintegration starts when her secret lover, low-ranking civil servant Jason Davies, is murdered on the Southbank in the wee hours. His death coincides with three others: Maggie, a jewelry shop assistant; tabloid reporter Philip; and Jun Chen, Chinese Ambassador to the UK. Chen’s death – initially chalked up to a whopping accidental heroin overdose – could trigger a profoundly unpleasant, prolonged international incident, possibly even a military strike or two. Helen, made reckless by her silent grief, is hellbent on uncovering who killed Jason and getting vengeance; Sam’s assignment is to keep her as safe while she does. 

Sam’s got his own problems; he didn’t retire. He fled in 2017 after his conscience wouldn’t let him complete a job, abandoning his partner, Michael (Omari Douglas). He’s been hiding out since out of shame and fear for his life. Lenny Lines (Kathryn Hunter), the underworld boss doling out his assignments, is not best pleased with him; Sam would love to escape without attracting her notice. That said, Reed had to put her well-shod foot down to get him to return to London (she’d been keeping her powder dry for years for just this situation), and thank goodness she did. Knightley and Whishaw have sensational bickering-yet-adoring cousins-style chemistry, their dialogue is good, and they make it sing. 

All the grief and fury in the air needs a counterweight, and here, too, Black Doves delivers, serving up the dry wit we know to expect from British spy shows and occasionally hitting us with actual laugh-out-loud comedy. The laugh lines are more often than not the domain of supporting characters like Williams (Ella Lily Hyland) and Eleanor (Gabrielle Creevy), two next-gen triggermen who switch from Sam and Helen’s adversaries to allies as they all frantically crisscross London in the week before Christmas. 

The setting and time of year are hardly an innovation – Slow Horses Season 4 opens on Christmas Day, and many of us were first introduced to Keira Knightley in Love, Actually – but this series makes the most of it thematically and visually. School Nativity Plays, making a Christmas pudding, gift shopping, parties, parties, and more parties – all provide moments where Helen’s job and the conspiracy she and Sam are trying to disentangle toggle between being hidden away and threatening to erupt into chaos. The twinkly lights and classic green-and-red color scheme set a visual tone that can shift on a dime from cozy and celebratory to moody and dangerous. 

It’s easy and fun to identify the series’s many influences, too, mainly because they’re worn so lightly. Sam is similar to another hitman with a code, Martin Blank, in Grosse Pointe Blank; his visit to a guitar store that’s also an arms cache suggests an affinity with the John Wick films; Helen has a showdown with a fellow agent that fairly screams Kill Bill; and there’s more than a little of the violence in pursuit of raw power that drives Gangs of London. 

Black Doves isn’t flawless, of course. As much as I root for Helen and Sam to succeed in their endeavors to uncover the various conspiracies standing between them and the truth of what happened to Jason, they both make decisions that threaten to upend the entire show by running so wholly counter to our understanding of them as highly competent in their chosen fields of espionage and assassination, respectively. 

As they race down their increasingly messy investigative path, they find themselves with competitors from the Chinese and American governments as well as London’s criminal underworld, leaving a string of corpses and/or property-destroying explosions in their wake. It’s occasionally a wonder that Reed and Lenny don’t just dispense with Helen and Sam entirely.

Why would Helen take the purloined phone of a potential culprit to her home? Why would she use that actual phone to communicate with the Shadowy Bad Guys in his contacts rather than clone it using her own little hacking device or having one of the Black Doves’ IT guys do so for her? Why, in the last seven years, would Lenny not have sent one of the other triggermen in her employ to finish the job Sam could not? Why would Sam get thisclose to ruining Helen’s mini-caper in the US Embassy by taking a call from Michael in the middle of it? 

It’s worth noting, though, that these imperfections are likely ones I wouldn’t have noticed had I not watched the entire series close to three times for in-depth coverage. In the end, of course, Sam, Helen, and their young colleagues uncover the truth and dispense, if not justice, appropriate vengeance. They even ensure that we get a thrill of hope for the future, and enough tantalizing suggestions of what Black Doves’s second season may look like to keep our appetites whetted.

All episodes of Black Doves will arrive on Netflix on Thursday, December 5, 2024. Season 2 is already in production and is expected to be released in 2026.