MGM+’s A Spy Among Friends Is a Patient, Magisterial Addition to the Spy Pantheon

If you are, like me, intermittently obsessed with the business of espionage, the name Kim Philby holds a sort of ineffable mystique in the darkest corners of your brain. Philby was the most notorious of the Cambridge Five, a group of British intelligence operatives who betrayed their country in ways big and small by spying for the Soviets from the 1930s through World War II, and in some cases well into the Cold War. Philby rose the highest, and caused the most damage and sacrificed the most lives—at one point, he was the chief British intelligence officer in the U.S.—and what’s most remarkable about his story is not his ideology, or his treason, but the fact that he should have been caught decades before he fled to the USSR.

Suspicions, allegations, and outright evidence of his betrayal had accumulated, and in 1951—after helping two of his fellow KGB spies escape to Moscow—he was accused publicly, grilled, and eventually had to resign from MI6… only to be granted immunity. He continued to work as a spy until he finally fled to Moscow in the ’60s, slipping from the grasp of British intelligence, whose thriving old-boy network may have let him go on purpose to avoid a scandal.

How could this possibly happen? To hear Philby tell it, it’s because he was born in the “governing class.” In other words, he was never going to be pressed too hard, and he would always get the benefit of the doubt, because he was the right kind of person, and the upper classes protected their own. To his friends and colleagues, a betrayal of the sort he committed was unthinkable, despite the fact that they’d watched several others do the same thing. And so he only had to keep his nerve, never confess, and keep double-crossing his friends and country until it became too egregious even for the diehards to ignore.

This is the dynamic explored in the excellent new MGM+ show (formerly Epix) A Spy Among Friends, a fictional look at the Philby affair based extremely loosely on the book of the same title by Ben Macintyre. While Macintyre’s compelling work is nonfiction, we’re told early on that the six-part limited series is “a work of imagination,” using real historical figures to tell a story they like just a little bit better. And if there’s a quibble to be had, it’s this: The overarching narrative here is that the spymasters of the British Empire were not simply duped over and over in the most humiliating way, but operating on some deeper level. You can argue that it’s a cop-out to depict something this way, even if you label it clearly as fiction; it exonerates the upper crust for the snobbish blind faith leading to one of the most disastrous diplomatic incidents the west ever suffered in the Cold War.

There is something legitimate in that line of argument, but the show is a comprehensive pleasure despite it. Guy Pearce stars as Philby, and it’s hard to imagine a better casting choice; he’s vulnerable, a little desperate, but at heart always charming, always skilled at making others love him. John LeCarre, the great spy novelist, recognized the spy-like tradecraft in the acting profession, particularly as it applied to Alec Guinness in his depiction of George Smiley, and in Pearce you can see the raw energy that blurs the lines between his own real-life craft and the tightrope walk undertaken for decades by Philby. He is pitch-perfect. Nearly as great, in perhaps a more taxing role, is Damian Lewis as Nicholas Elliott, Philby’s friend-turned-adversary whose task was to finally debrief Philby when he had been caught beyond reasonable doubt, and return him to England. Lewis’ depiction is rife with rage at Philby, panic at the potential crash of his own career, but in the best moments, full of a love for Philby that even the greatest betrayal couldn’t erode. There’s a tremendous restraint and delicacy to Lewis’ performance that is, to me, miles better than his solid performance in Homeland, and when that restraint slips, the emotional release is something to behold.