'The Agency' Books a Return Engagement on Showtime

You can fool enough of the people for long enough that a lousy series can get a second season. The Agency airs on the utterly unwieldy platform of "Paramount+ with Showtime," which means it does not air on Showtime or Paramount+, but if you subscribe to both, you can watch the former on the latter. Somehow, despite that sentence making little sense, the promised combination of Michael Fassbender, Richard Gere, Jodie Turner-Smith, and Jeffrey Wright got "a record number" of viewers to watch the premiere on the platform. Paramount executives rushed to boast of the record and greenlight a second season despite reviews that called the show tedious and marveled at how one could waste that level of topline cast. But that's just one more reason why Paramount Studios is the first major studio to collapse in the face of the streaming wars and will be owned by Skydance before 2025 is up.

To be fair, Paramount is desperate for anything that can be considered a net positive without the word "Yellow" in the title (Yellowjackets being the far superior of the two). Moreover, you can't blame audiences for checking out the premiere in droves since the series is already based on the French language hit series The Bureau, and the company's last massive hit before its Yellow period was the spy thriller Homeland. Also, The Agency doesn't seem that bad in the first episode or so; it's not until you reach Episode 3 or 4 of the ten-episode season* and realize that absolutely nothing has happened yet that it starts dawning that the show is not worth it.

(*Ten episodes? In this economy?!)

But at least the cast will have work for a little longer, even if any second season that emerges (if one does) will be streaming under very different circumstances.

It's also worth noting that the numbers Paramount cites (5.1 million in the first 48 hours) in the Season 2 renewal press release aren't real; as Deadline notes in its caveat, the company has "no way to measure single-household streams," which is a fancy way of saying, the studio heads have no idea if anyone is watching the service, it's just that the “active sub households”  rose to that number over the weekend. The assumption is those people signed up to watch.

Perhaps even more tellingly, the press release does not include a Season 2 synopsis, and no cast member, not even Fassbender, is confirmed to return, though that could be chalked up to not wanting to spoil who dies in Season 1. But hey, Paramount can act like it has a hit for the last few months before it becomes someone else's pet project. Consider it a nice consolation prize, and maybe the new company can figure out how to improve the show come Season 2.

The Agency Season 1 continues on Paramount+ (with Showtime) through the end of January 2025.