A 2026 review calls ITV’s five-part Secret Service Tv Series "not, in any conceivable way, fun." The adaptation of Tom Bradby’s 2019 novel follows Gemma Arterton’s Kate Henderson, an MI6 agent with a secret job to hide from her family, as Whitehall politics and national-security alarm collide.
The series is a five-part drama adapted by Tom Bradby and Jemma Kennedy from Bradby’s 2019 novel. On screen, Henderson and her team uncover evidence suggesting that a member of the cabinet may be a Russian asset, and those discoveries send the plot from the SIS building into sharper political terrain.
Key moments in the drama play out in Whitehall and in Malta. Henderson infiltrates the Malta base of a Russian oligarch named Igor Borodin — who is played by Miglen Mirtchev — and the findings there precipitate a resignation in Downing Street. The resignation triggers a leadership contest in which two likely candidates emerge: Imogen Conrad, the home secretary, and Ryan Walker, the foreign secretary.
The series stages the leadership battle as part character drama, part security thriller. The review quotes a line from the prime minister in the drama: "The last thing we need is allegations of Russian collusion. We all know what happened in America," and places that line against the unfolding suggestion that Moscow may have cultivated influence inside the cabinet. Ryan Walker’s friendship with the Russian foreign minister and his flirtation with nationalism are written into the storyline as potential vulnerabilities.
On casting and scene work, the show leans on Arterton’s Kate Henderson as the center of what the review frames as a serious attempt to dramatize contemporary espionage. Henderson’s double life — balancing family responsibilities while operating covertly for MI6 — drives much of the series’ human stakes, and the Malta infiltration is staged as its central operational set piece.
The review situates Secret Service against recent espionage television, naming Slow Horses as a point of comparison and noting the expectations that come with that pedigree. It emphasises the adaptation choices by Bradby and Kennedy and notes how the plot threads — cabinet suspicion, oligarch bases, leadership turmoil — are intended to dramatize current anxieties about foreign influence and national security.
The tension the review highlights is straightforward: the drama assembles topical ingredients and a recognisable cast, but the critic’s verdict is blunt. Despite the five-part scope, the Malta sequences and the Whitehall intrigue, the review concludes — in its own words — that "Secret Service is not, in any conceivable way, fun." That summation answers the central question the review poses about the show’s effectiveness: it finds seriousness and topicality, not entertainment.
