Keira Knightley and Ben Whishaw’s Sparkling Onscreen Partnership Helps Black Doves Take Flight

At first glance, Netflix’s high-profile new espionage thriller Black Doves feels like a show most of us have seen before. To be fair, we probably have, to one degree or another. There’s a mysterious covert group that deals in dangerous international secrets, a spy trying to hide a double life from their family, an assassin wondering whether it’s time to call it quits, and an agent who can no longer quite decide which aspects of themselves are fiction or reality. The streamer is clearly aware of this, if only because all of the associated marketing materials surrounding this show have leaned into that same all-too-familiar imagery: colorful explosions, a sudden hail of bullets, creative hand-to-hand combat, often with a quippy one-liner thrown in here and there for good measure. But while Netflix seems to (Inexplicably!) want potential viewers to believe that Black Doves is a traditional revenge thriller with a dash of geopolitics thrown on top, I’m here to tell you that couldn’t be further from the truth, in the absolute best way possible.  Yes, those familiar spy thriller elements are key parts of the show. But much like fellow Netflix series The Diplomat before it, Black Doves is utterly delightful precisely for all the ways it manages to shake up the tried-and-true formula so many recent dramas like it have embraced. 

Deliciously fun and funny in ways the spy genre is rarely allowed to fully embrace, the story is a welcome good time in a space that often takes itself much too seriously. Is its premise sort of generally bonkers? Kind of. Is the story often straight-up ridiculous? Yup! Will all of it make sense? Not really! But, will you care? Probably not. Because Black Doves manages to make an entire sub-genre feel brand new again, thanks to the unique pair of best friends at its center. It’s true, stars Keira Knightley and Ben Whishaw are probably not anyone’s immediate idea of a must-watch action duo—though Whishaw did spend several years playing a high-tech quartermaster to Daniel Craig’s James Bond—but their offbeat relationship is the unconventional heart that holds the entire series together. (And, yes, they both still get to do some ass-kicking along the way.)

Knightley stars as Helen Webb, the well-off wife of U.K. Defence Minister Wallace Webb (Andrew Buchan), an up-and-coming Tory politician that virtually everyone agrees will be Prime Minister someday soon. She’s got it all: a gorgeous house, a pair of well-behaved twins, and a gift for throwing the sort of enjoyable but not too crazy holiday fetes required of politicians’ wives. She also happens to be a spy.  

A member of a private espionage organization known as the Black Doves, Helen (not her real name) has spent over a decade passing secrets to the mysterious Reed (Sarah Lancashire), who sells them to the highest bidder. Her marriage to Wallace started as a simple bar hook-up mission, though their relationship has grown into something much more genuine and complicated in the years since, and the Black Doves are eager to keep her—and the access her husband’s position provides to government intel—in place. But things are thrown into chaos when her secret lover, a civil servant named Jason Davies (Andrew Koji), is suddenly assassinated for reasons unknown, and it looks like Helen’s life might be in danger.

Whishaw plays Sam Young, a bitchy, champagne-loving assassin forced to live in exile on the Continent after a job seven years prior went south. Summoned home by Reed to help keep his former BFF Helen alive, Sam vows to help her learn the truth about what happened to Jason and who could have wanted him dead. As the story spirals outward, the two besties find themselves entangled in a complicated geopolitical conspiracy involving a dead ambassador, his missing daughter, and some major players in the London criminal underworld. 

As present-day Sam and Helen reconnect, chase clues, and banter snarkily amongst themselves, flashbacks fill in their respective backstories and early days together, when he was a simple driver and she was a fresh recruit he had to teach to shoot. As their lives and missions become more complicated, we watch both struggle with aspects of the people they’ve become and the work it takes to keep their respective secrets from those they care about. Black Doves shines brightest when it leans into this delightful central relationship, and the sparkly chemistry between Knightley and Whishaw is a delight from their first scenes together. A pair of lost souls who find both camaraderie and comfort in one another, at first because they have no one else to turn to and then because they’re each the only person the other can be their true self with, their friendship is the show’s most important and compelling bond. 

Knightley makes for a convincing and charming lead, deftly switching between the various faces Helen must wear with an ease that speaks of an exhausting sense of repetition. Black Doves smartly doesn’t give into the spy genre’s tendency to make its heroine an inexplicable badass, giving her fighting scenes that deliberately take advantage of her smarts and surroundings (one in her kitchen in which she threatens a would-be assailant with household utensils is great). Helen’s affair with Jason, conveyed via gauzy quick-cut flashbacks, is boring enough to make you grateful this show isn’t terribly interested in the relationship as a romance for its own sake, and this aspect of the story works much better as a tool for Helen to come to terms with her own ideas about who she is and what she wants out of her life than as a straightforward revenge quest.

Sam, for his part, is still pining over the ex-boyfriend (Omari Douglas) he left behind and having a mild existential crisis over the job that initially drove him from England, even as he determinedly hunts down those who might prove a threat to his bestie. Whishaw quietly proves himself the series’ MVP with his soulful expression and prickly exterior, and he gets both Black Doves’ best lines and its most compelling emotional arc. An unrepentant killer who still lives by a moral code of his own making, he’s precisely the sort of figure who is utterly believable as a sarcastic nerd who turns out to be a cold-blooded crack shot. Together, he and Knightley are dynamite, and the series is ten times more entertaining when they’re sharing the screen with one another.

The six-episode (all of which were available for review) first season is propulsive and briskly paced, with multiple high-tension race-against-the-clock chase sequences and dramatic shoot-outs. While you’ll likely yawn at some of the more laborious details about the various factions scrambling to solve the story’s central murder, the series’ snappy dialogue and sly, three-dimensional approach to depicting the lives of the folks who commit various acts of violence helps make Black Doves’ central story more fun to watch than it probably has any right to be. It’s easy to see why the series has already been renewed for a second season, and I, for one, can’t wait to see the jobs these besties go on next.

Black Doves premieres Thursday, December 5 on Netflix. 

Lacy Baugher Milas is the Books Editor at Paste Magazine, but loves nerding out about all sorts of pop culture. You can find her on Twitter @LacyMB.

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