‘Gray’ – because ‘not everything is black or white’

“Not everything is black or white,” one of the characters says toward the end of this series. That doesn’t mean there’s always a lot of subtlety in the spectrum in between.

“Gray,” an eight-part series released in 2023 on Netflix, is like a sugar addiction. Except it uses a sugar-substitute, which leaves you with the same nervous cravings but not even a single calorie that might give you the energy to go on living. You watch it. You watch the next episode, and the next, and soon you’re at the end of six hours of programming wanting more because the stuff you’ve ingested so far has not even started to satisfy the hunger that led you to start.

But that’s not my reason for writing this analysis. It’s that there’s something annoying – no, worse than that, troubling – that underpins the entire conception of this work and undermines further our sense of trust in society and even storytelling. Worse still, it does so without even thinking about it, or why it might matter.

Cornelia Gray is a former CIA spy brought back to hunt for a mole in semi-independent three-headed internal investigations outfit Cerberus. So far, so “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy.” But with a difference: Cornelia Gray isn’t George Smiley, that genteel, put-upon embodiment of intelligence, in both senses of the word, that John Le Carré brought to our consciousness 50 years ago (yes, in 1974). Smiley had retired. Gray had been in hiding, having been accused – rightly? – of killing a very high-ranking CIA officer, whose daughter, Sara Beckham, is now with the agency as a data analyst and discovers Gray, hiding in plain sight in upstate New York.

This promising twist on Le Carré’s original is the first hook that get the spy-story addicts in the audience, like me, to bite. Let’s keep watching, but not for the sake of watching “Tinker, Tailor” again (the Alec Guinness mini-series in 1979, and again and again; the Gary Oldham movie 2011, once was enough). And reading the book itself, twice. Let’s see what fresh insights the writers bring to this re-make!

I won’t recount the story. It is complicated, no doubt written to a timeline calculated to deliver crises at all the crucial moments – end-of-episode, just-before-the-commercial-breaks that will follow once this show slips from subscription-only to advertising-supported release. The complications include multiple mis-directions. Things aren’t what they first seem to be – it’s a well-known motif in spy fiction.

This is a clever series. Too clever. But that’s not what worrying about this series. Let’s look at the concepts that lie beneath the surface of plot.

For Le Carré’s Smiley, ambiguity arose when actions had two valid meanings at once. An act of loyalty toward one was an act of betrayal toward another. Nothing was black or white, but the grays were many and nuanced. In “Gray,” ambiguity reduces to a two-faced Janus, manipulative and deceptive. The plot and characterization in “Gray” tell that that the CIA is a nasty place, its agents are self-serving, miserable, shallow people.

In “Tinker, Tailor,” when certainty finally arose, we felt a rush of regret. Ambiguity was somehow more comfortable. Certainty brought discomfort. In “Gray,” in the end we know for certain, and what’s left is the aftertaste of a sugar-substitute. “Tinker, Tailor” taught us the value of skepticism. “Gray” is cynical. It tells us it’s fine to smirk.

What I most fear is this: That the skepticism-cynicism distinction may have implications for how the consumption of fiction affects trust in institutions. “Tinker, Tailor” showed – through helping us imagine a plausible past – that institutions matter, and that they may be malign. We must take care of them, but also care for them. “Gray” shows – through shoving at us an implausible present – that institutions are malign, and that nobody cares. If the series seemed based in something beyond the screenwriters’ desire for cliffs to hang from, that is, moments of suspense, it might help us understand the political world we live in.

We need to be skeptical of institutions, now as 50 years ago. We cannot afford to be cynical, ever.

“Tinker, Tailor” was a novel, and then a television series, and then a movie full of ideas. Through devices of deception inherent in espionage, it gently and persistently surfaced ontological questions: What is real, what is fake? It raised epistemological questions: How do we know what’s real or fake? It teased out moral and psychological questions, too: What is loyalty, what is betrayal, what motivates us toward either, and how does each feel? “Gray” would like to raise similar questions, but it uses a bulldozer to bring them to the surface.

The final episode of Series 1 clearly foreshadows a Series 2. It might be as entertaining as the first. I doubt I’ll watch it.

[For a lesson in the use of grays, try instead the n Netflix adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s novel The Talented Mr. Ripley. The Netflix version, called “Ripley,” advances in black and white at the pace of a languorous afternoon in the southern Italian coastal heat and humidity. Every motionless close-up of the faces of the characters builds tension. Perhaps I’ll come back to that in a later post.]