--- title: "Spooks" year: 2002 kind: "series" canonical: "https://film.one/tv/spooks" fi1m_score: 77 critics_reviews: 3 published: "2026-09-18T08:17:36.904657+00:00" updated: "2026-09-18T08:17:37.780849+00:00" region: "US" licence: "© Fi1m Ltd. Written by AI under a human editor; checked against sources before publication. Quote with attribution and a link to the canonical URL." --- # Spooks (2002) Created by David Wolstencroft · 1h 00m · MPA TV-14 · Drama, Action & Adventure, Crime **Fi1m score: 77** · Critics: 3 of 6 reviews so far *In a sentence:* Join MI5, see the world, and do not count on seeing the end of the series > David Wolstencroft’s MI5 series is fast, glossy and, in its early years, colder and crueller than the surface suggests. It ran for ten series and should have stopped after five, but the first few remain some of the sharpest thriller television Britain has made. ## Synopsis London, 2002. Section D of MI5 works from the Grid, an open-plan floor of glass and monitors inside Thames House, under Harry Pearce (Peter Firth), a senior officer who has stopped expecting to be thanked. His junior officers, Zoe Reynolds (Keeley Hawes) and Danny Hunter (David Oyelowo), spend their days on surveillance and their evenings pretending to be other people, while Malcolm Wynn-Jones (Hugh Simon) supplies the wiring and the false passports. The first case is an anti-abortion terrorist planning attacks in Britain, and the team has to get inside the plot before the bombs are placed. Each hour brings a new threat and a new cover story, and the officers go home to partners who cannot be told where they have been. ## Review The proposition of *Spooks* is that spying is a job. Not a calling, not a game between gentlemen, but shift work done by tired people in an office with too much glass, who lie to their families and are shouted at by politicians. David Wolstencroft’s series began on 13 May 2002 with six episodes and kept going for ten series and 86 hours, until 2011. Our verdict is that the early series are as good as British thriller television got in those years, and that the later ones keep the pace while losing most of the point. It is worth your evenings, with a clear instruction about when to stop. The look was new for the BBC and has been borrowed ever since. The Grid is a set of blue-lit glass partitions and banks of monitors, and the series shoots London as steel, grey river and concrete underpass. Surveillance is shown in split screen, three or four panels at once with a timestamp running, so we are watching the watchers watch. A long roster of cinematographers passed through, Sue Gibson and Sean Bobbitt among them, and a longer roster of editors, including Barney Pilling and Jonathan Amos, and the house style held: short scenes, hard cuts, a clock always ticking somewhere in the frame. It is a style that can hide thin writing, and later it did. Early on, it is put in service of scripts that know what a dead letter drop is. The second episode does something to a member of the team that we will not describe. We were horrified, and then we noticed we had sat forward. It was the moment the series told its audience the rules: nobody is protected by their billing, and the people who do this work are not going to be rewarded for it. Wolstencroft and the writers who followed, Howard Brenton, Neil Cross and Dennis Kelly among them, understood that a thriller is frightening in proportion to what it is willing to take from you, and for several years they took a great deal. Peter Firth is the reason to keep watching when the plots wobble. Harry Pearce is played almost entirely in the pause before he speaks, and Firth can make a man reading a file look like a man deciding whether to end a career. Keeley Hawes and David Oyelowo give the first series its warmth, two young officers who still think they can have lives. Nicola Walker arrives in series two as Ruth Evershed, an analyst who says the awkward true thing in meetings, and her scenes with Firth become the most adult strand the programme has. We will not say where it goes. Hugh Simon’s Malcolm Wynn-Jones is the quiet man with the soldering iron whom everyone underestimates, including the writers, and Anna Chancellor’s Juliet Shaw is the Whitehall voice that turns up to remind Harry who pays for the building. The later arrivals are more variable. Rupert Penry-Jones’s Adam Carter is a handsome man given handsome-man problems. Hermione Norris’s Ros Myers is the best of them, an officer who answers every question with a colder one, and she carries the middle series almost alone. By the time Lara Pulver’s Erin Watts and Max Brown’s Dimitri Levendis take their desks, the turnover has become a formula. A new face arrives, is given a flat and a secret, and is spent. The threats inflate at the same rate. The first series worried about one bomber and a mole. Later series threaten London with something on the scale of a war roughly every other week, and the tradecraft that made the early hours convincing, the tailing, the dead drops, the borrowed identities, gives way to laptops that can do anything the plot needs in the time it takes to say so. We found ourselves bored by the end of a series in which the country was, again, minutes from ruin, and then irritated at being bored by something that had once made us flinch. Against *The Sandbaggers* or the Le Carré adaptations, this is louder and far less patient. Against its American contemporaries, it is smaller, cheaper and more willing to lose, and that willingness is its real distinction. Watch the first three series, and the fourth if you have grown fond of the office. Stop when you notice that a death no longer costs you anything. It is a 15, and the certificate is earned by the ideas as much as the violence. *Fi1m score 77, published 18 September 2026.* ### Reviews we read (3) - **The Guardian**, Mark Lawson (80/100, inferred): The critic praises the series for its fresh take on villains (anti-abortion terrorists) and tradecraft details, calling it smart and fast with impressive scripts that highlight the human costs of spying. [Read](https://www.theguardian.com/media/2002/may/13/tvandradio.columnists) - **The Times**, Joe Joseph (70/100, inferred): The review praises the series for its clever handling of the cliffhanger from the previous season and its ability to deliver unexpected twists in the spy drama format. It highlights the stylish execution and engaging narrative despite the fantastical elements. [Read](https://www.thetimes.com/comment/register/article/tv-review-c8ss3pvg5jm) - **Digital Spy**, Morgan Jeffery (85/100, inferred): The critic praises Spooks as a stylish and influential spy drama that shaped modern television with its grounded approach to the genre. They highlight its strong writing, solid performances, and ability to balance escapist entertainment with brutal realism in the early seasons. [Read](https://www.digitalspy.com/tv/tube-talk-gold/a452161/spooks-tube-talk-gold/) ## Details - **Created by:** David Wolstencroft - **Creator:** David Wolstencroft - **Director:** Alrick Riley, Omar Madha, Julian Holmes, Edward Hall, Sam Miller, Bharat Nalluri, Rob Bailey, Justin Chadwick, Julian Simpson, Bill Anderson, Charles Beeson, Paul Whittington, Jeremy Lovering, Peter Hoar, Colm McCarthy, Brendan Maher, Ciarán Donnelly, Andy Hay, Michael Caton-Jones, Stefan Schwartz, Andy Wilson, Antonia Bird, Jonny Campbell, Cilla Ware, Kenneth Glenaan - **Writer:** Ben Richards, Howard Brenton, Sam Vincent, David Farr, Neil Cross, Jonathan Brackley, David Wolstencroft, Raymond Khoury, Rupert Walters, Richard McBrien, Zinnie Harris, Christian Spurrier, Simon Mirren, Sean Cook, Russell Lewis, George Tiffin, Steve Bailie, Raymond Khoury, James Moran, Julian Simpson, Matthew Graham, Dennis Kelly, Anthony Neilson, Oliver Brown, James Dormer - **Cinematography:** Damian Bromley, James Welland, Nic Morris, Sue Gibson, Giulio Biccari, Kieran McGuigan, Adam Suschitzky, Shane Daly, Tony Slater Ling, Sean Bobbitt, Simon Chaudoir, Nigel Willoughby, Jake Polonsky, Balazs Bolygo, Fabian Wagner, Jan Jonaeus, Baz Irvine, Ben Smithard, Donal Gilligan, Vincent De Paula - **Editor:** Jamie Pearson, Barney Pilling, Paul Knight, Jonathan Amos, Paul Endacott, Victoria Boydell, Søren B. Ebbe, Luke Dunkley, Jamie Trevill, Adam Recht, Ian Sutherland, Belinda Cottrell, Colin Green, Patrick Moore, Guy Bensley, Phil Hookway, Daniel Gethic, Mike Jones, Nigel Bunyan - **Cast:** Peter Firth as Harry Pearce; Miranda Raison as Jo Portman; Nicola Walker as Ruth Evershed; Hugh Simon as Malcolm Wynn-Jones; Rupert Penry-Jones as Adam Carter; Keeley Hawes as Zoe Reynolds; Hermione Norris as Ros Myers; David Oyelowo as Danny Hunter - **Runtime:** 1h 00m - **Certificate (MPA):** TV-14 - **Release (the US):** 13 May 2002 - **Genres:** Drama, Action & Adventure, Crime ## Where to watch in the US - Peacock: streaming, hd - Amazon Prime Video: streaming - BritBox: streaming, hd - The Roku Channel: free, hd - Amazon Prime Video: free - Peacock: free, hd - Tubi: free, sd - Amazon Prime Video: add-on - Apple TV: add-on, sd - The Roku Channel: add-on, hd - Amazon Prime Video: buy, sd *Checked 2026-09-18.* Also available in: AT, AU, CA, DK, FR, GB, IE, IT, NO, NZ, SE, US. Add `?region=XX` to this URL for another country. ## If you liked this - *The Sandbaggers* (1978): The desk-bound original: spying as budgets, memos and men sent to die cheaply. - *Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy* (1979), Fi1m 88: Alec Guinness listens for seven hours and it is more tense than any bomb. — [Fi1m page](https://film.one/tv/tinker-tailor-soldier-spy-1979.md) - *Deutschland 83* (2015), Fi1m 74: A young East German agent in the West; the tradecraft is real and so is the pop. — [Fi1m page](https://film.one/tv/deutschland.md) - *The Bureau* (2015): French intelligence as a workplace drama, slower and sadder than the Grid. - *Slow Horses* (2022), Fi1m 82: MI5’s failures in a damp office; the antidote to all that glass. — [Fi1m page](https://film.one/tv/slow-horses.md) --- © Fi1m Ltd. Written by AI under a human editor; checked against sources before publication. Quote with attribution and a link to the canonical URL. Canonical: https://film.one/tv/spooks