John Hughes (Shaun Evans) has been a spy for 20 years, but a life of enviable glamour still eludes him. Within minutes of him being introduced to us, he is on his back outside a motorway service station, shock and blood on his face. Two corpses – an informant, and a hitman who killed the informant and then lost a grim fight to the death with John – are lying beside him under a dull grey sky.
Back at MI5 HQ, a reprimand awaits. John’s meeting with his doomed contact – on a promise of intel involving a possible foreign threat to national security – was yet another op conducted without following the proper protocols. Part of his punishment is to be given a new partner, Mehreen (Zahra Ahmadi), parachuted in from MI6 over John’s head: once she has taken over the case, his bosses want John out. John keeps investigating regardless.
Betrayal is an espionage thriller so drab and downbeat, it plays more like a crime drama. John is a maverick with a complicated personal life, an irascible dinosaur pursuing his last quarry before the stiff shirts in head office finally manage to manoeuvre him into redundancy. It’s just that instead of his iconoclastic rule-breaking being in service of catching local murderers, John may be the only man who can stop Iran carrying out a major terror attack.
Like all renegade sleuths, John has a longsuffering spouse castigating him whenever he makes one of his occasional, half-hearted returns to the home that can never stimulate him as much as being out there, in the field, bringing down villains. Sharing John’s expensive but sad Victorian semi in London is a better-drawn other half than most, even if our first meeting with her is a big old cliche: Claire (Romola Garai) tersely rings John when he’s in the middle of a stressful fiasco at work, to remind him he is at that minute supposed to be attending their couple’s counselling session.
As a GP, Claire has her own difficult and time-consuming job, yet it always seems to be her who has to run the house and look after the kids. Well, it’s Claire and the au pair, but still: John is too wrapped up in his terribly special vocation to lower himself to domestic or emotional labour, and his tactic of defusing every complaint with humour or an airy, calm-down-love dismissal lost its currency a decade ago. Garai gets it perfectly: the main emotion she gives Claire isn’t anger but deep, bitter fatigue. That woman is TIRED.
Yet when your drama’s protagonist has an extraordinary job where lives are on the line, how gritty and believable can their personal woes plausibly be? Betrayal’s selling point is that it commits as fully to the portrait of a relationship in distress as it does to the spy adventures, but it’s not an easy marriage. Working in an MI5 terror unit, where unexpectedly staying late can be rather non-negotiable and keeping secrets from your other half is a legal requirement, is one profession where behaving as John does is understandable, even more than it would be if he were out solving regular crimes. Garai’s excellent portrayal of a neglected wife feels like it belongs in a different genre of drama altogether.
Betrayal tries to square the circle by making the thriller part of the show dour as well, locating the action in dirty car parks, flat-roofed pubs, musty B&Bs and high streets littered with crap takeaway joints. Oblique, Ipcress File camera angles accentuate the malaise. It’s all as bilious and knackered as John, whose time in the office is a series of tetchy face-offs marked by him railing against sissy modernity: his cracks about MI5’s patchy mental health provision, and his sarcastic comment that it is “deeply problematic” when someone offers him tea without an option for almond milk, go down poorly.
What with all that and the arduous visits to John’s unhappy home, there’s not much energy for a spy plot. Our man plants trackers, leans on sources, survives interrogations and hacks laptops, but not in a storyline that has much speed or complexity. The dialogue regularly resorts to gobs of exposition to fill gaps, and both the first two episodes get to their closing cliffhangers via the cheeky shortcut of suddenly revealing key information to us but not to John, whose eyes we are otherwise seeing through. The twist that arrives halfway is guessable because not enough has happened for there to be all that many possibilities.
Like his co-star Garai, Shaun Evans succeeds more in spite of the material he’s given than because of it, bringing a bewildered vulnerability to John’s struggle to be better. John doesn’t like who he is; Betrayal isn’t sure what it is.
