Tom Rob Smith writes careful, tender stories about two people, then sends a conspiracy to interrupt them. The people are nearly always worth the evening. The conspiracy, once it has to be explained, is where the writing loosens.
Fi1m perspective
The first two hours of London Spy (2015) contain almost no spying. A young man who has had too many lovers meets a young man who has had none, and Tom Rob Smith lets them talk, and eat, and fail to say what they mean, for longer than most writers would dare. It is the best thing he has put on screen, and it tells you what he is for. He is a writer of two people in a room, who keeps deciding that the room is not enough.
The habit runs through the career. He started as a script editor and writer on Doctors and Dream Team, and storylined Cambodia's first soap opera, which is the sort of apprenticeship that teaches you to keep a relationship going for years on nothing. Then came the novels, Child 44 (2008) first, with two sequels, then The Farm (2014) and Cold People (2023). Television took him back: London Spy, then every episode of The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story (2018), MotherFatherSon (2019) and Class of '09 (2023), which he created. Each puts a love affair or a family beside power of some kind, a state or an institution, and watches what it does to them.
The trouble is the power. London Spy is two programmes joined in the middle, and Smith is much better at the first. Once the men in good suits begin waiting in cars, the conspiracy only works if every person in it does one thing and never a second, and the fourth and fifth hours have to explain it, and the explanations are silly. Smith cares more about what the plot does to Danny than whether it holds together, which is a defensible position for a novelist and a harder one for five hours of television. Somewhere in the fourth hour a man told Danny how the world worked, and we felt the series slip away from us; two hours earlier we had been as close to two characters as television gets.
He is honest about where his interest lies. Of the reaction to the opening episode he said, "I was really surprised that Danny and Alex’s sex scene in episode one shocked anyone. It was as mild as I could have made it." The love was the point; the spying was what happened to it. He has been well served by his collaborators. Ben Whishaw in London Spy never behaves as if he is in a lesser programme than the one he started, and Jakob Verbruggen directs all five hours so that the look holds even when the writing does not.
The reservation most often raised about Class of '09 is over-complication, which is the complaint we had about the back half of London Spy, so the pattern looks like his rather than the fault of one commission. The recommendation is simple. Watch the first two episodes of London Spy and you will have seen what he does best. If he ever writes the love story and leaves the men in the cars, we would like to be there.
Biography
Tom Rob Smith is an English author, screenwriter and producer. Born in London in 1979, he is the son of a Swedish mother and an English father. He graduated from St John's College, Cambridge in 2001 and studied creative writing for a year at the University of Pavia in Italy. Early in his career he worked as a scriptwriter, including storylining Cambodia's first soap operas.
His debut novel Child 44 was published in 2008 and was followed by the sequels The Secret Speech (2009) and Agent 6 (2011), as well as the standalone novel The Farm (2014). Child 44 was adapted into a 2015 film. He created and wrote the BBC Two series London Spy (2015) and later created and wrote MotherFatherSon (2019) and Class of '09 (2023). He wrote all episodes of the second season of American Crime Story, subtitled The Assassination of Gianni Versace (2018).
Smith won a Primetime Emmy Award and a Golden Globe for American Crime Story. He has also received BAFTA and RTS nominations for London Spy.
