How TV’s Political Thrillers Lost the Plot

The latest Marvel TV series, Secret Invasion, opens with an uncharacteristically timely monologue. “Imagine a world where information can’t be trusted,” rasps a CIA agent in present-day Moscow. “Not very hard, is it? News service says one thing. Website says another. Society starts to fray. All we can turn to are the people we care about. But what if those people weren’t who we thought they were?” So far, so chillingly authentic to this era of information bubbles and conspiracy thinking. But then Agent Prescod (Richard Dormer) continues: “What if they weren’t even human?”

It turns out he’s talking about Skrulls: reptilian space aliens who hide behind human faces on Earth. According to his theory, a series of international terrorist attacks, each claimed by a different group of militants, are really all part of the Skrulls’ plot to overthrow humanity. It’s a shrewd setup, familiar enough to resonate in the real, chaotic world of 2023 but vague enough to be universally palatable. Depending on your perspective, the Skrulls could be the lizard people of proto-QAnon conspiracy theories or Russian intelligence operatives undermining democracy.

This slippery approach to political subtext is nothing new for Disney-owned Marvel, which is constantly recalibrating its family-friendly superheroes for a time when extreme partisanism can render even the most anodyne entertainment controversial—and when Hollywood products must satisfy the conflicting mores of the many nations that import them. What’s notable about Secret Invasion, styled as a Cold War spy thriller but abstracted from the ideological conflicts of the real Cold War, is how common its particular form of evasiveness has become among TV’s most popular thrillers. Shows set within the crucible of politics suddenly seem allergic to political ideas of all kinds.

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Often the result is thematic incoherence so conspicuous it makes suspension of disbelief impossible. Series as technically polished as Netflix’s hit Keri Russell vehicle The Diplomat and Amazon’s Russo brothers franchise Citadel hang on eye-poppingly absurd premises. Yet behind these screens that streamers have left blank for members of enormous global audiences to project their own diverse values, a political perspective both cynical in its opaqueness and aspirational in its simplicity is taking shape.

The Apple TV+ miniseries Hijack, a real-time thriller in the tradition of 24, unfolds on a seven-hour flight from Dubai to London. Idris Elba stars as a passenger who happens to be a preternaturally calm corporate negotiator who has shepherded clients through high-stress mergers and takeovers. So he’s uniquely prepared to influence the hijackers toward his preferred outcome: getting home alive. First, he has to figure out who they are and what they want.

The history of airplane hijacking is a history of political outrage taken to brutal extremes. Blockbuster thrillers from Air Force One to Die Hard 2 have often mirrored this theme. Hijack—brace for a mild spoiler—is different. After a bit of misdirection involving a hijacker who speaks Arabic and is thus presumed by two oafish passengers to be a suicide bomber, it becomes clear that these attackers have no political agenda. The motivation behind their crime is so complex and unlikely as to verge on nonsensical.

You can see why its creators would avoid political subtext. Post-9/11 thrillers like 24 and Homeland notoriously fed Islamophobia. The right’s peculiar sensitivities dictate that Putin’s Russia is no longer a universally acknowledged foe. Meanwhile, Apple TV+ is—like Netflix, Prime Video, et al.—available in more than 100 countries. There’s no way for a show designed for broad international appeal to parse the politics of real state violence and terrorism without alienating audiences crucial to its success.

Recent thrillers set squarely in the realm of global politics have contorted their story lines in even sillier ways, presumably for similar reasons. The Diplomat casts Russell as a career Foreign Service officer suddenly appointed as the American ambassador to the UK, just after a deadly attack on a British aircraft carrier. The show teases the usual suspects—Iran, Russia—before settling on a patently ridiculous culprit closer to home. The moral of the story? Diplomacy is good. It’s a takeaway so innocuous, you’d have to be a militant extremist or a war profiteer to disagree.

Dopier still is Citadel, an expensive espionage thriller that, despite an underwhelming rollout, Amazon is spinning off into a multilingual franchise. The plot circles around the question of which of two ex-lover agents (Priyanka Chopra and Richard Madden) sabotaged the show’s eponymous top-secret organization. An international group described as being “loyal only to the safety and security of all people,” Citadel watched the watchers, preventing nuclear launches and Y2K crises. Before its annihilation by Manticore, an also-blandly-international crime syndicate, it was “the last line of defense for good in the world.”

It’s possible to make a substantive thriller without explicitly addressing any real-world political situation. (See: TNT’s The Lazarus Project). What’s disconcerting about this new crop of shows is that their studied neutrality extends to abstract ideals like freedom and safety. Cold War thrillers tended to champion capitalist individualism over authoritarian communism. Post-Watergate conspiracy thrillers from The Parallax View to Three Days of the Condor cautioned viewers to question authority at home. But their contemporary counterparts are so timid, they’ve reduced a supposedly grown-up genre to so many superhero stories, awash in truisms. The bad guys are bad because they’re criminals. The good guys are good because they’re the good guys.

The irony is that, as much as we might look to entertainment to escape from the world’s endless problems, no form of pop-culture storytelling can ever be truly apolitical. These thrillers’ rejection of not just current events but also the conflicting ideas and values that underlie them is, itself, political. It reveals the widening gulf that separates viewers, both at home and abroad. And it speaks to our collective exhaustion with politicized discourse.

In tiptoeing around such extreme sensitivities, TV’s new thrillers end up inhabiting moral universes where characters, bereft of personal convictions about things like justice or the common good, can only make selfish decisions. Elba’s Sam, whose choice of career suggests a ruthless pursuit of self-interest, is upfront with the hijackers. He doesn’t want to be a hero; he just wants to get home to the people he loves. By the end of its first season, Citadel devolves into a sort of high-octane family drama, propelled by passion, betrayal, and trauma—that all-purpose plot driver—rather than by any deeper understanding of what its clash of titans means for the world.

It’s all pretty cynical, and accidentally reflective of a public sphere where any expression of belief or concern is likely to be dismissed as virtue signaling. Yet the flipside to the glibness of these shows is their sincere longing for simplicity amid the complexities of a world where so many tribes of adherents to mutually exclusive dogmas seem certain they’re right. As bland as The Diplomat’s defense of diplomacy is, it’s also soothing—16 months into Russia’s war on Ukraine, as refugees stream out of Syria and South Sudan—to imagine an elite corps of public servants competently nip ping international incidents in the bud. What is Citadel but an imaginary representation of the same fantasy?

There is nothing more quintessentially human than the wish for perfect knowledge of right and wrong. It’s the foundation of religion and philosophy. The deus ex machina has been a narrative device since Ancient Greece. Now, we call those characters superheroes, and they don’t wait ‘til the end of the story to show up with a moral judgment. But superhero tales are simplistic for a reason: they were conceived for children. In a more sophisticated world, where the so-called bad guys are people whose claim on Earth is just as legitimate as our own—not space aliens looking to displace the whole lot of us—the only honest way to separate good from evil is to define those terms.