Keira Knightley and Ben Whishaw shine in the exciting Netflix series “Black Doves” | TV/Streaming

When we first meet Helen Webb (Keira Knightley), the protagonist of Netflix’s latest spy thriller Black Doves, she’s wearing a beautiful dress and perfectly curled hair that doesn’t move an inch. Helen, the wealthy wife of Defense Secretary Wallace Webb (Andrew Buchan), has enjoyed a large house, two children and a Christmas tree full of presents in her life. But Helen has a secret. She happens to be a member of the Black Doves, a private spy organization with no loyalty that works exclusively for the highest bidder.

While her marriage began as a simple mission, her relationship with Wallace has evolved into something real, albeit complicated. At the heart of this complication is an affair with civil servant James Davies (Andrew Koji), who is murdered along with two other people at the beginning of the series’ first episode. Helen’s closeness to James and the secrets she’s told him may be why her employers want her back in the game. Or perhaps there are other secrets hidden beneath the surface of Helen’s broken disguise, secrets so great that they seek to destroy the very foundations of the land.

In Helen Webb, Knightley has been given the role of a lifetime, forcing her to balance her comedic chops with her physicality. Although she has always been an extremely talented acting actress, in Black Doves she is given the space to give audiences a performance from her that they have never seen before. Helen is confident and sophisticated in the life she has built with her politician husband. But as her past comes back to haunt her, that sophistication slowly erodes away, revealing a cracked interior that will shatter before the end of the season. Knightley is joined by an equally fantastic Ben Whishaw, whose role as her accomplice Sam is the emotional glue of the series.

He also suffers from the burden of his past, particularly the lover he left behind when he fled London seven years before the start of the series. Sam is the emotional core of the series: he stumbles over one apology after another and blinks his eyes excessively before he can shed tears. Early in the series, Helen is described as “a coiled spring, a weapon,” and it is clear that neither she nor Sam have progressed beyond that description. As they adjust to their lives of espionage and murder, the secrets they have tried to hide stubbornly rear their heads, exposing the two characters for the broken people they truly are. In Helen’s case, this drives her to uncover the many secrets at the center of the series, but in Sam’s case, it drives him to become even more disillusioned with the life he leads.

The streaming market is almost oversaturated with spy thrillers, but it’s clear that creator Joe Barton understands this. Rather than simply having Knightley and Whishaw helm a run-of-the-mill political thriller, he instead gives these actors the best material they’ve been offered in years, allowing them to embody two of the most interesting characters to hit screen this year. Both Helen and Sam – and the supporting characters who accompany them on their mission – are fighting two different versions of themselves. One is a person who does what she’s told and doesn’t ask questions, and the other is a person , who is exhausted by the system she finds herself in and is desperately looking for a way out.

This is where “Black Doves” surpasses all of its competitors – in its willingness to defy its genre and in the empathy it shows its main characters. Although the Black Doves is a typical and often apolitical intelligence agency, the people who belong to it are imbued with a code of ethics that is in direct contradiction to the agenda of the organization they serve. Even the most robust supporting characters, who come into the series with a touch of psychopathy, slowly develop into fleshed-out people whose depth is not reflected in their job. It is an exciting series in which we can see some great action sequences, but also allows us to fall in love with these characters when they are at their most banal.

Within the short run of six episodes, the series never loses its wit, style and heart. From shootouts to tender confessions of love, “Black Doves” feels like a revelation in a genre that’s getting more boring by the year. Even the most laborious storylines, in which various government agencies rush to uncover a politician’s murder, have a spark to them. Where most series of this type would falter due to a bloated story or suffer from uninteresting characters, creator Joe Barton has created a series that feels like it’s desperate to show why it’s different. Luckily, it delivers on that promise in every way and looks set to become one of the most popular spy thrillers of the decade if it gets a second season.

Entire series screened for review. On Netflix December 5th.