Netflix’s 'Hostage' Situation Is Compulsively Watchable

Our streaming services are conducting a long-term love affair with a genre I’ll call Let’s Put A Female Leader Under Duress! You know the qualities I’m talking about: A competent, often powerful woman is going about her critical business, and finds herself in the middle of a major political crisis, usually driven by a threat to her family and/or nation. How will she respond? How will she marshal her energies, intelligence, and inner circle to help her navigate the crisis? Will she try to keep it all a secret, suffering under the misapprehension that it will be safer, somehow, to do so? 

We’ll know that she will do so if she talks about taking transparency and honesty seriously before the eruption of the situation that will drive the rest of the series. Some people around the Female Leader Under Duress will urge her not to yield an inch to the evil-doers, while others will counsel doing as they say. Everyone will worry aloud that they’re just not sure she can withstand the pressure of being both a woman and a leader in a time of crisis. 

Some characters will lose their lives, and traitors within her midst will be unmasked. The female leader will learn that she can trust her instincts and savoir-faire, and, usually, return everyone to the safer status quo, so she can return to being the competent female leader that she is, now that her mettle has been adequately tested. She’ll emerge from that trial by fire stronger than before – tempered, even! It was a terrible experience, but she’s glad to have survived and to have learned some important lessons about leadership that she can rely on the next time something dreadful comes up.

That brings us to Netflix’s newest series, Hostage.

There are many variations on Hostage's theme, and it’s a big tent, capable of including The Diplomat, Bodyguard, Black Doves, Trigger Point, and Vigil. Fans of Let’s Put A Female Leader Under Duress! have been feasting for the last few years, and can go into watching the five-episode limited series Hostage assured that they’ll be pushing away from the table with a clean plate, largely satisfied. 

There are many aspects of Hostage that work, particularly the premise, pacing from episode to episode, and casting. British Prime Minister Abigail Dalton, played by Suranne Jones (Gentleman Jack), already has her hands more than full with a dire National Health Service medication shortage (thanks, supply chain issues!), a prickly relationship with the visiting French President Vivienne Toussaint (a pitch perfect Julie Delpy) and an ailing father (James Cosmo). Naturally, she finds herself in a waking nightmare when her husband, Alex (Ashley Thomas), and his entire Doctors Without Borders team are abducted at gunpoint in French Guyana. 

The kidnappers’ demand is odd – rather than a monetary ransom or some prisoner release, they want Abigail to step down as prime minister. Thinking that a French-run rescue operation will make their demands moot, Abigail finds herself stymied when the kidnappers blackmail Vivienne with a highly compromising video, convincing her to scrub the rescue mission. All of this brisk early exposition segues seamlessly into even more high-momentum plot twists as each episode unfolds. It’s almost too easy to let episode after episode autoplay as the plot hurtles towards its conclusion. 

It’s a fun, frothy watch, and steers clear of the goofy plot developments that make COBRA so entirely un-serious by acquiring some extra gravitas via the texture and depth of Jones and Delpy’s performances. They’re Hostage’s secret weapon, starting out as a study in contrasts and working their way towards a true alliance. Abigail is a caring pragmatist, aghast at Vivienne’s flinty opportunism, while Vivienne finds Abigail’s humanism pitiably naive. As the two leaders find themselves in increasingly choppy, deep waters both politically and personally, they also find ways to collaborate.

The casting goes the extra mile with supporting actors, too, including very fine turns by Lucian Msamati (Gangs of London) as Abigail’s chief of staff, Kofi; Corey Mylchreest (Queen Charlotte: A Bridgerton Story) as Vivienne’s stepson, Matheo; and Martin McCann (Blue Lights) as the primary abductor. 

Jones, who also executive-produced the series, imbues her performance with a sincere drive to do right by her people and credible warmth as a wife and mother. It’s a great strength of the show, Vexingly, that proves both one of Hostage’s great strengths and its most persistent weakness. No matter how modern Abigail is – her loving, egalitarian marriage to a highly accomplished Black physician does a lot of work here – she’s still being forced to deal with both the dire political situation and the fact that everyone expects her to crumble in the face of how personal the threat is. 

Are powerful female characters always going to have to field Gender Studies 101-level questions and comments about how emotional they are? Abigail’s own father stops just short of calling her a monster for sticking to the very nation-over-self philosophy he drilled into her for decades. Her steadfast refusal to negotiate with the abductors catches them by surprise, too. 

That’s no mean feat; as the leader of the crew of kidnappers, McCann’s character (we don’t learn his name until the final episodes) is a force to be reckoned with. He runs an incredibly tight ship, and his disciplined team executes a precise, brutal operation. The double-agents he’s placed in both Abigail and Vivienne’s orbits are effective, and he pivots smoothly to increasingly incendiary tactics when it’s clear that Abigail Dalton simply won’t budge. 

Ultimately, of course, that’s his fatal flaw. He’s so mission-focused that he winds up making increasingly cruel decisions with minimal returns on his investment, and having put in so much time and effort into it all, he can’t step away from it, even when he knows he should. 

As I watched each episode, relishing every twisty plot development and character beat, I kept wondering why the abductors wanted Abigail to resign. To what end? The rationale remains murky, up until the finale. When we do learn the motivations for that endgame, they’re revealed as things that should have torn apart the bad guy coalition before their operation even began. 

Still, Hostage is likely to find an enthusiastic audience – Let’s Put A Female Leader Under Duress! is a very popular genre – who, as I did, will find it easy to keep watching regardless of its flaws.

All episodes of Hostage are available on Netflix starting Thursday, August 21, 2025.