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.