4 out of 5

Created by: Alexi Hawley

covers season 1

As a fan of Alexi Hawley’s growing stable of show-run series, I felt immediately familiar with The Recruit‘s tone, and look, and feel: a high-stakes action series bound to a common man (or woman) POV, with a strong bench of side characters and shot through and through with comedy. While that perhaps sounds like what any given buddy-cop or comedy-drama or adjacent show / movie aims for, The Recruit (Alexi’s other main show) set a high bar for what that could really mean when you make the storylines complex but accessible, the characters essentially still one-note – the funny one, the stoic one, etc. – but still human, and when the action / jokes / and drama actually feed into one another, and don’t just feel like tacked on extras.

Of course, I’ve just explained what amounts to something of a template, and that lends itself to a certain level of predictability. That can be part of the comfort that brings us back to a weekly TV show, but a bingeable streaming series is perhaps a little different in that regard. Hawley’s know-how for structuring things to a tight TV hour definitely pays off in that the writers of The Recruit understand how to have legit cliffhangers at the end of each ep (something that those starting in the streaming world don’t always appreciate), but there’s also a kind of hemmed-in, self-contained feeling to each episode as a result, which makes balancing with the overall story – a larger, and more complex one than the show’s creators could probably attempt over something longer than 8 episodes – sometimes a bit at odds. That is: for as international and this-goes-to-the-top as the double-crossings and covert intel sharings CIA lawyer Owen Hendricks (Noah Centineo) gets involved with, it also feels like our scope is limited to a few people and a few locations. That also plays into the aforementioned “look and feel” of the show: vast government and criminal organizations and globe-trotting locations do a good impression of being those things, but also are easily reused locations and small sets. And though the visuals have a certain cinematic upgrade, the framing is very TV – dynamic but not overly inventive – and we even share the same type of needle drops as The Recruit, down to some exact same songs.

But: let’s swing around to those positives. Owen is just starting at the CIA, and despite getting dragged by his new workmates (Colton Dunn, Aarti Mann), he discovers some overlooked business involving potential blackmail (or “greymail” in this case – unsubstantiated blackmail) that sets him off to research the incarcerated Max Meladze (Laura Haddock), and discovers enough truth to allow him to keep digging. Hendricks’ methodology is fun to watch: he’s not the sharpest stick and doesn’t claim to be, but he’s willing to consider connections outside of the box, and is familiar enough with humans to be comfortable with manipulating them with his charm, staying on the audience’s good side by generally doing this with enough honesty and earnestness. Unfortunately, that means he ends up piecing together an exploding bomb of intel that gets him more involved with Max, and the ever-escalating hijinks that entails.

Both Centineo and Haddock are fantastic, playing off one another, but it’s really the character balancing that sells it: the world of The Recruit is full of self-serving folk, and while I can understand that being offputting, it’s consistent. While the real CIA might be more of a partnership than displayed here, I think we can all recognize from our daily lives that constant balance of capitalism in which we need to, y’know, help others… but also protect ourselves and our jobs. Take that to an extreme, and you have the characters of show who are always running their own agendas. Owen would seem to be an exception to this, of course, but that’s part of his arc: to realize that his approach to life has its own version of this. More obvious shows would take Max on the opposite trajectory so that she meets Owen in the same end place – a frienemy meetcute – but Hawley’s shows have been good at that aforementioned consistency: people’s attributes remain intact, but they grow on us as we get to see the nuances on those attributes.

And the show is a journey. I really can’t say I was able to guess exactly where it was going, as every step establishes a possible m.o. for how it will continue, but then the next episode throws a wrench in that. Occasionally getting there means we have those dialogue / conceptual shortcuts where someone says or does something (or doesn’t say or do something) that is only way too clearly going to complicate things in the next scene, but the show is not egregious with these kinds of moves. Most importantly, these smaller negatives never detracted from my enjoyment of every episode, and looking forward to the next one, up through the tense twists and turns of the season one conclusion, which was kind of obvious, but in that great way where you’re just waiting for that shoe to drop, and then it does… and you can only wait nervously for the next season.