Alexander Cary writes spies as people who have known each other too long, and his best scenes are two men alone together working out who lied first. When they part he slows down and explains, and that is where his television loses us.
Fi1m perspective
Two men who have been friends for more than twenty years sit down in a Beirut flat in January 1963, and one of them has come to tell the other that London knows. That is the scene Alexander Cary built A Spy Among Friends (2022) around, and it is the scene he has, in one form or another, been writing for years: two people who know each other too well, and the slow business of working out who lied first. Cary served in the army before he wrote for television, and it shows in how his spies carry themselves. They are tired and unexcitable, and they treat secrets as work rather than adventure.
The career came late and sideways. He moved to the United States in the late 1990s, spent most of a decade with little to show for it, and then went up through the writers' room on Lie to Me (2009), from story editor to showrunner. From there he joined Howard Gordon and Alex Gansa on Homeland (2011) and wrote episodes across the early seasons, which are the ones we recommend; our review has no reason to single out one writer, which is how a good room is meant to work. He created Taken (2017) for NBC, and then came home, in a sense, with A Spy Among Friends, his first British show as showrunner, adapted from Ben Macintyre's 2014 book and directed by Nick Murphy.
That series is where you can see what he does and where he goes wrong. He gives Guy Pearce and Damian Lewis scenes in which the friendship and the lie are the same sentence, and they play them superbly. We leaned in every time the two of them sat down together, and we checked the clock every time they stood up, because Cary then cuts to London and has somebody explain what we have just watched. He is interested in class, in the old-boy networks that, in his telling, stopped anyone looking too hard at Philby, and he invents a character, Lily Thomas, to ask the questions nobody inside the club would. It is a fair idea and it is not lightly done. Some found it preachy; we found it slow, which is worse, because a six-part series has to move. The story is about two hours shorter than the series that tells it.
He has said of it: "It really is a show about friendship against the backdrop of espionage." That is true of everything of his we rate. He writes the friendship well. It is the backdrop he cannot leave alone. Four hours of it, with the same two men, and we would have recommended it without the caveat.
Biography
Alexander Cary is a British television writer and producer. Born Lucius Alexander Plantagenet Cary on 1 February 1963 in London, he is also known as Alex Cary and holds the courtesy title Master of Falkland. He trained at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst and served as an officer in the Scots Guards, including deployments to Northern Ireland and the Gulf War, before moving to the United States to pursue screenwriting.
Cary contributed as a writer and executive producer on the series Homeland (2011–2014), for which he received shared credit on the 2012 Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Drama Series. His other credits include writing and producing on Lie to Me (2009–2011), creating and writing the series Taken (2017) and the miniseries A Spy Among Friends (2022). He has been married to Jennifer Marsala since 2013 and was previously married to Linda Purl.
