Move Over, 'Night Manager'; The Best-Ever John le Carré Miniseries Is a Hidden Gem on Streaming

John le Carré is not only a favorite author among spy fiction buffs but a consistent inspiration for Hollywood adaptations. Le Carré’s novels have been frequently adapted to the big screen, with films like Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy emerging as contemporary classics. Although le Carré’s masterpiece The Little Drummer Girl was first adapted for a 1984 film starring Diane Keaton and Klaus Kinski, AMC took another stab at the material and created one of the greatest spy dramas ever. As is often the case with le Carré’s novels, there isn’t a clear-cut hero and villain; the series examines just how fungible the line between agent and accomplice can be, and how hard it can be for investigative agents to retain their values.

While the source material is so brilliant that making a great series would seem like a straightforward task, the differences within the mediums required a master filmmaker to ensure that the show could stand on its own. The Little Drummer Girl was directed in its entirety by Park Chan-wook, the legendary South Korean filmmaker behind such masterpieces as Oldboy, The Handmaiden, and last year’s No Other Choice. Park had experimented with English-language material with his 2013 thriller Stoker, but The Little Drummer Girl is daring, exciting, and shocking in a way that feels like a breath of fresh air, even when compared to his other amazing work.

What Is 'The Little Drummer Girl' About?

One of the most fascinating proclamations in The Little Drummer Girl is the notion that spycraft is all a matter of acting, so it makes sense that a theater star would make for the perfect undercover agent within a cover operation. The Little Drummer Girl is set in 1979 during a peak in tensions between Israel and Palestine, as the “Black September” tragedy still looms over European politics. It’s after an attack that Mossad agents Martin Kurtz (Michael Shannon) and Gadi Becker (Alexander Skarsgård) decide to launch an operation to reveal the terrorists and root out their conspiracy to commit violence. Their plan involves the recruitment of Charlie Ross (Florence Pugh), an accomplished stage actress with prominent left-wing views, to go undercover and Khalil Al Kaddar (Charif Ghattas), the ringleader behind the Palestinian terrorist movement. After Charlie discovers that Kurtz and Becker have more information about her than she had expected, she finds herself roped into a plot that becomes far more complicated than anyone would have realized.

The Little Drummer Girl reflects the nuances of undercover operations, which are more complicated than simply identifying a bad guy or halting an attack; for Kurtz and Becker, it is of greater value to take down Khalil’s entire network and take revenge so that a similar attack will not occur in the future. The series takes advantage of the fact that all the characters are being dishonest with one another in one way or another, and might even be lying to themselves. Charlie begins to feel conflicted about her actions when she comes to form a relationship with Khalil and sympathizes with some aspects of his cause; however, the fact that Kurtz seemed able to predict the fallout suggests that he may have expected the two to fall in love. By far the most mysterious character in the series is Becker, as Skarsgård is so great at playing a smooth, charismatic spy that it becomes difficult to determine when he is being honest. Even when he has an emotional breakdown and admits to Charlie the anger he feels about innocent people who were killed, it's unclear if he is trying to manipulate her even further.

‘The Little Drummer Girl’ Is One of Park Chan-wook’s Greatest Achievements

Park is better than nearly any other living filmmaker at finding creative ways to stage set pieces, and The Little Drummer Girl includes suspenseful moments of intrigue that are unlike anything else on television. Although he showed similar inventiveness in directing episodes of HBO’s The Sympathizer, Park’s work on The Little Drummer Girl feels more complete because he had complete autonomy over the entire project. The careful way in which Charlie must create a persona and immerse herself in a different persona is realized through shifts in perspective, which reveal how the “truth” can be subjective based on people’s varying memories. Although the time spent detailing the exact ways in which these operations are handled could have been too intricate to fit within the confines of a feature film, six episodes are enough time for The Little Drummer Girl to show the beauty of the process.

There is certainly a presence of the type of dark humor that Park is best known for, but The Little Drummer Girl is bleak in the observations it makes about cyclical violence, as it imagines a never-ending trajectory of tragedy and revenge that ends up fueling more generational hatred. None of the characters come out unscathed because they all have blood on their hands (both literally and figuratively), and it's left up to the viewer to determine whether the ending should be interpreted as an uplifting one. Even if it retains the setting of le Carré’s novel, The Little Drummer Girl feels slick and modern and shows that Park could be just as effective when working with an international cast; released one year before Midsommar and Little Women, The Little Drummer Girl seemed to anticipate that Pugh would become one of the best actresses of her generation. The Little Drummer Girl is an unmissable masterwork that should be considered required viewing for le Carré’s readers, Park’s fanbase, and anyone who appreciates great filmmaking.