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    ‘The Agency’ Is a Slick and Pleasing Spy Drama

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    Based on the French show “The Bureau,” the new Showtime series stars Michael Fassbender as a spy who must readjust to life after living undercover.Pity the C.I.A. agents deploying their enhanced interrogation techniques, beating hostages and meddling; truly it is they who suffer. It’s hard work being a spy — but the hardest work of all is loving yourself.“The Agency,” beginning Friday on Paramount+ (and debuting on Showtime at 9 p.m. Sunday), is set mostly within the London office of the C.I.A., where one of the primo dudes (Michael Fassbender), code name “Martian,” has been abruptly yanked back from a mission in Ethiopia. He was undercover there for six years, living as Paul and falling in love with Sami (Jodie Turner-Smith), a Sudanese historian and political activist. He wasn’t ready for the mission to end, and he is definitely not ready for their relationship to end — but c’mon, what are a few bent rules in the interest of hot-people diplomacy?“This isn’t national security; this is personal,” Martian insists to his boss (Jeffrey Wright). “It’s the agency,” the boss bellows back. “Nothing is personal!” Ooooh!The series is based on the terrific French show “The Bureau,” and in the four episodes (of 10) made available for review, it deploys a lot of spy-show standards: the rookie to whom everything must be explained, the ambitious but naïve flunkies, the secretly cooperative foreign attaches, the higher-ups who seem institutional and out of touch until they drop some monologue wisdom on our heroes.Fassbender’s mesmerizing performance is the biggest draw here, giving viewers a real taste of what it’s like to love a liar. We’re never quite sure what his angle is, how much of his seemingly vulnerable moments are all part of the game. He finds an intriguing sparring partner in the agency’s therapist (Harriet Sansom Harris), with whom he is required to meet on account of how hard it is to reintegrate into real life after living undercover for so long. Other story lines for secondary and tertiary characters feel comparatively unmoored.But on the whole, it’s all very slick and overtly, pleasingly fancy-schmancy. The show’s reflective-surfaces budget alone puts some national G.D.P.s to shame. The London of “The Agency” is a pallid grayscape where even the mall is dreary, where real life is the same color as CCTV footage. Every move here is surveilled, and the show revels in that constant unease. As the saying goes, just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t after you. More

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      ‘As We Speak’: Rap Music on Trial’ Review: Weaponizing Lyrics in Court

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      Lyrics that contain references to violence have been used as legal evidence, a practice this documentary by J.M. Harper condemns as unfair and prejudicial.Imagine music that you wrote being held against you in a criminal proceeding. In the documentary “As We Speak: Rap Music on Trial,” the Bronx-born rapper Kemba travels around the country and to Britain, interviewing artists and legal experts about how that has been more than a theoretical possibility for rappers.Mac Phipps, for instance, was convicted of manslaughter and spent more than two decades in prison, even though another man had confessed to the crime. (He was released in 2021.) In an interview with Kemba, he describes how references to violence in his lyrics were used at his trial, despite what he suggests was inadequate context. (One line cited concerned his father, a Vietnam veteran.)Elsewhere in this documentary, directed by J.M. Harper, the academic Adam Dunbar explains a set of studies he conducted. Participants were asked to judge lyrics from the same song: Some were told they were rap lyrics, others were told they were country and still others were told they were heavy metal. The group that believed the words were rap lyrics labeled the songwriter as having a greater criminal propensity. When the artist manager Chace Infinite argues that rap is taken more literally than other music, the movie cuts to clips of Johnny Cash and Freddie Mercury. Would a jury have accorded legal weight to Cash’s claim, in song, to have “shot a man in Reno just to watch him die”?Kemba situates the association of rap with crime in a historical context of censorship of Black music. In another thread, “As We Speak” imagines Kemba himself on trial, with his writing being used against him in a criminal court. The staged material is a bit heavy-handed, but “As We Speak” makes a powerful case for the necessity of being free to make art, and for public awareness that art rarely qualifies as legal evidence.As We Speak: Rap Music on TrialNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 36 minutes. Watch on Paramount+. More

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      Paramount Lays Off Hundreds of Workers

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      The company, which is moving away from traditional TV, lost more than $1 billion last year at its streaming division.Paramount, the owner of TV networks like Nickelodeon, MTV and Comedy Central, is laying off hundreds of employees, cutting costs as it continues its painful transition away from traditional television.About 3 percent of the company’s roughly 24,500 employees will be affected by the layoffs, according to a person familiar with the cuts, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive corporate information.Bob Bakish, Paramount’s chief executive, said in a memo to employees that the cuts were part of a bid to “return the company to earnings growth.”“While I realize these changes are in no way easy, as I said last month, I am confident this is the right decision for our future,” Mr. Bakish wrote. “These adjustments will help enable us to build on our momentum and execute our strategic vision for the year ahead — and I firmly believe we have much to be excited about.”Paramount is at a crossroads. The company’s controlling shareholder, Shari Redstone, is considering selling her stake in the company, a deal that could bring decades of family ownership to an end. Skydance, the media company that helped produce Paramount franchises like “Top Gun” and “Mission Impossible,” has expressed interest, but no deal has yet materialized.Like all its peers in traditional media, Paramount has struggled to keep pace with Netflix as streaming services supplant traditional TV and moviegoing. The company’s biggest streaming service, Paramount+, has not yet become profitable, putting a drag on the company’s profits. Paramount’s streaming division, which also includes the ad-supported service Pluto TV, lost more than $1 billion last year.Though viewership of Paramount’s cable networks is in decline, parts of its TV business remain resilient. Paramount’s CBS network, which broadcast the Super Bowl on Sunday, generated record ratings for the game, which saw the Kansas City Chief defeat the San Francisco 49ers in overtime. About 123.4 million people watched the game, according to Nielsen, up from 115.1 million the year before. More