Starring: Mark Strong, Joe Dempsie and Karima McAdams.
[Spoiler Alert]
I just finished binge watching season 1 of Deep State on EPIX starring the remarkable Mark Strong. I was pleased also to see Joe Dempsie (Gendry –Game of Thrones) and Zubin Varla (Strike Back).
Season 1 follows the character of Max Easton (Mark Strong) who is pulled back into the spy game to avenge the death of a fellow agent. At the outset, I was slightly confused, until I realized that they were jumping back and forth through the timeline. Max’s story starts out in the present. He is living happily in France with his wife Anna and their two daughters. His family is unaware of his past, when suddenly Max must leave after he receives a veiled threat from his old boss George White, who leads a MI6/CIA anti-terrorist division, The Section. Max doesn’t want to go back to that life until he learns the identity of the dead agent, his son Harry. Max has been told that Harry’s team had turned on him and killed him and agrees to eliminate the remaining members.
At the same time, the audience is being introduced to Harry (Joe Dempsie) and his fellow spies who are running an op in the Middle East. The team is led by Alexander Said (Zubin Varla), but the audience can’t be sure if he is a good guy or bad guy, until Said takes Harry out into the middle of the desert and almost kills him. Said had been told by George White that Harry was conspiring with the terrorists, but he realizes he has been lied to. He tells Harry to disappear and returns to the rest of the team and tells them that Harry is dead.
Max goes to Beirut and catches up with one member of the team, who confesses as he is dying that Harry isn’t dead. Leyla, another team member, is captured by the Libyan police. Max contacts an old rival and makes a deal for access and custody of Leyla. They don’t trust each other but confide in each other and realize they don’t know who they can trust.
Eventually Harry’s story catches up with Max’s, when Max and Leyla run into Harry as they are both chasing the same guys. Harry harbors resentment against Max for leaving his mom and him when he was a child, but an uneasy alliance is formed to get to the truth. Both the CIA’s Amanda Jones and MI6’s George White have lied to the team and each other, further obfuscating the truth.
The tagline for the show is “Truth is a matter of perspective.” This is true, whether you are talking about something as simple as the weather or something as controversial as terrorism. Each person believes they are speaking the truth; however, in DEEP STATE the audience discovers even the truth isn’t that straightforward. The Section has been manufacturing evidence to allow a private military contractor to maintain and increase their profits from the war.
Eventually, Max and company discover this collusion and present their evidence to Senator Burrell, who was the chairman of a subcommittee investigating the Section. He is presented with a taped confession by one of the co-conspirators. Torture, kidnapping, murder and betrayal abound in this series and the audience is left to wonder how much of these situations are drawn from real life. While this is frightening, the truly terrifying thought came from a statement by Senator Burrell after viewing the confession, “People aren’t interested in the truth anymore. It doesn’t play like it used to.”
Unfortunately, this does seem to be the truth. People’s attention span has decreased. If information can’t be condensed down into an Instagram post or Tweet, they aren’t interested. Gone also are the days of Woodward and Bernstein where journalists seemed to care whether what they reported was true for more than one news cycle. One can only hope that eventually, as Shakespeare said, “The truth will out.”
DEEP STATE kept me riveted to my television from start to finish. This is must-see television at it’s best. I can’t wait to binge season 2.
Everything & Nothing 