About 10 minutes into Killing Eve, I realized was watching my new favorite show.
BBC America’s Killing Eve is a deliciously twisted take on the spy vs. spy thriller
Come for Sandra Oh as a restless agent, stay for Jodie Comer as a terrifying assassin.
Caroline Framke wrote about culture, which usually means television. Also seen @ The A.V. Club, The Atlantic, Complex, Flavorwire, NPR, the fridge to get more seltzer.
I fell for the show immediately — right after I met Eve (Sandra Oh) and Villanelle (Jodie Comer), the show’s instantly magnetic core characters who got harder to resist the more I got to know them. Eve is a restless, incisive agent with killer instincts. Villanelle is a restless, calculating killer with a wicked sense of humor. Both are brilliant, bored, and obsessive — especially when it comes to each other.
The “we’re not so different, you and I” hero versus villain dynamic is so well-trod that it’s become the most classic of clichés. But what Oh, Comer, and creator Phoebe Waller-Bridge — the acidic wit behind Fleabag, another show worth watching immediately — do with Luke Jennings’s series of novellas makes for an extraordinarily slick take on the thriller that proves impossible to shake once the credits roll.
It feels too cutesy — or at the very least, too reductive — to call the meticulous, curious, and even sexy way Eve and Villanelle circle each other a “cat-and-mouse game.” If anything, both are cats — Eve domestic, Villanelle feral — recognizing the other from across a crowded room, slinking around the edges, waiting to see who pounces first.
Killing Eve draws its world and characters with sharp, insightful nuance
I’ll be honest: It takes a lot for me to get invested in a spy thriller beyond the slick optics of a heist gone right (or wrong). But I was curious about Killing Eve given the combination of its two female leads and Waller-Bridge, whose six-episode series Fleabag is one of my favorite comedies in recent memory. Watching seven of the first season’s eight episodes, I wasn’t sure what to expect. Would Killing Eve be a surprisingly dark show from a hilarious comedic writer, or a pointedly funny show playing in another genre’s sandbox?
As I maybe should’ve guessed given Fleabag’s ability to morph on a dime, Killing Eve is a little bit of both. Waller-Bridge’s sharp observational skills that make Fleabag’s jokes so funny prove an invaluable asset for Killing Eve, filling out characters with just a few well-chosen lines and keeping a steady eye on its unraveling central mystery. Even Eve’s ragtag group of fellow agents find ways to make their marks in between the high-stakes set pieces, from David Haig’s affably exasperated Bill to Kirby Howell-Baptiste and Sean Delaney’s pair of wisecracking assistants.
More importantly, the writing is often at its best when it allows Eve and Villanelle to get a little messy. Eve is a fantastic agent who knows her shit, but she’s also someone who crushes Disney songs at karaoke, exchanges wry exasperation with her co-workers, and gets itchy when her husband fails to understand her love for a uniquely dangerous job. Villanelle is a psychopath assassin with an unparalleled knack for murder, but she’s also snarky and playful, with a love of mimicking passersby and drowning herself in luxurious clothes.
These are the kinds of details that some might dismiss as frivolous, but that nonetheless lay the groundwork for these two to become real characters that exist outside their hunt for each other. So whenever the cross-patterns of who’s working for what organization start to get a little murky — and they do, despite excellent performances from Fiona Shaw and Kim Bodnia as Eve and Villanelle’s handlers, respectively — Killing Eve always has its razor-sharp characterization to fall back on.
It helps, of course, that the women tasked with embodying Eve and Villanelle are actors working at the top of their game.
Killing Eve’s not-so-secret weapons are the brilliant performances from Sandra Oh and Jodie Comer
As Oh herself tells it, not even a lauded starring role on a beloved show got her the kinds of opportunities she had been hoping for once she left Grey’s Anatomy. So when she first got the script for Killing Eve, Vanity Fair reports, she thought for sure that she would be auditioning for what Hollywood thinks of as a traditional “Asian role” — a doctor, or a receptionist — before being shocked to discover that she was being considered for the lead.
That Oh, who burned up the screen every time she appeared on Grey’s, had such a hard time finding decent roles afterward is infuriating enough. But watching her performance in Killing Eve drives home exactly how frustrating it is that we’ve missed out on seeing Oh take on more leading roles worthy of her talent.
Oh takes every ounce of humanity on the page and chews into it with obvious relish. Her Eve is tenacious and practically vibrates with excitement any time she thinks she just might have a lead. But when she’s thrown into an unfamiliar or uncomfortable situation, Oh allows her unease to be just palpable enough for us to detect before Eve buries it deep somewhere inside herself so she can keep doing her job — or, as is often the case, to go beyond her job description to pull up the stubbornly hiding truth by its roots.
But it was crucial that Oh find a worthy scene partner to play Villanelle — and whew, did Killing Eve find a hell of an actor to take the job in Comer.
Watching Comer’s Villanelle operate feels like watching a lion pace far enough away that the danger of her ripping you apart isn’t exactly immediate, but the threat of that changing is definitely imminent. Her wide-set eyes are always either scanning their surroundings with careless curiosity or narrowing in laser focus — and the moment when one mode becomes the other is always electrifying. Villanelle enjoys that people are drawn to her, but she rarely uses that part of her arsenal when actually making a kill, preferring instead to explode with precise, horrifying bouts of focused violence. In Comer’s hands, Villanelle is as funny as she is frightening, alluring and awful, and there’s never a moment when she doesn’t know it.
So, yes, I promise Killing Eve is a show outside of Eve and Villanelle’s tense, mutual hunt; its cases and kills of the week are, in fact, compelling. But as long as the show has this pair’s obsession, respect, and intrigued attraction to each other pulsing at its center, it’ll be a thrill to watch unfold.
Killing Eve airs Sundays at 8 pm Eastern on BBC America. The premiere is currently available to stream on BBCAmerica.com.
