Spy miniseries The Veil is great to binge, then whinge about

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The Veil, a new FX spy miniseries misfire starring Elisabeth Moss with its first two episodes now streaming and new ones dropping each Tuesday on Disney+, is a show that keeps stripping away surfaces to reveal a new television template underneath.

Call it the dance of the seven Veils. But there’s no shocking head or anything else served up on a silver platter at the end of this untethered war-on-terror throwback from Peaky Blinders’ creator Steven Knight worth all that moving about.

In a jaunty cold open, viewers are introduced to an MI6 agent played by Moss – the Mad Men/The Handmaid’s Tale star revelling in a British accent, eyes aglow – as she corners an international criminal in a European airport and hands him over to Interpol.

Moments later, she’s on her mobile phone, ready to accept her next assignment – and picking a new name for herself: Imogen.

Seems like some fun and pulpy Killing Eve stuff, maybe? Not so fast.

The first jarring shift comes when the next scene moves the action to a snowy UN refugee camp on the Turkish and Syrian border.

Adilah (Yumna Marwan), one of the downcast women sheltered there, hops on the back of an aid truck stuck in the mud to help pass out bags of flour – only for a Yazidi woman in the crowd to cry out that she’s the Djinn al Raqqa, a notorious Islamic State leader.

Imogen’s mission is to spirit Adilah, a French citizen, away from the camp before she is killed – and get to the bottom of whether she is, indeed, one of Islamic State’s only female commanders, or just a single mom from a bad banlieue who got wrapped up in a little low-level extremism and then escaped.

So, this is more serious spy stuff – like the great French series The Bureau, about radicalization and the government agencies that fight/fuel it. As it happens, Imogen is even on secondment from MI6 to France’s Directorate-General for External Security – and is running this mission with her lover, Malik (Dali Benssalah, who sports the exact same expression for six episodes straight).

But wait. Here comes a CIA agent called Max played by Josh Charles to switch the tone again; he’s the American id incarnate, anxious for Imogen to get her talking to terrorists over with so he can start waterboarding.

Max is described accurately as the most “American American” by Malik’s boss, played by Thibault de Montalembert from Call My Agent in John Lennon glasses. (De Montalembert must have landed a good English-language agent after that Netflix gig as he’s popping up all over streamers of late; you’ll find him, too, on Apple TV+’s Franklin)

Charles is on the scene, swaggering about, because The Veil’s plot also has a ticking time bomb – a literal one that’s going to be put on a boat and sent to the East Coast of the United States.

Is this 24, then? Let me look closer – aha! Is that a man with an Eastern European accent and thick eyebrows? Has Islamic terrorism been once again used only to grab an audience, then thrown aside for the good old antagonists of Russia and the FSB? It’s 24, all right.

And what a shame because Yumna Marwan, who plays whoever the main female Muslim character is (no spoilers here), is a very compelling actor – and it would have been nice for her to have turned out to be a genuine co-star of The Veil rather than a plot detonator.

Alas, Adilah is increasingly sidelined as a backstory about Imogen moves from incomprehensible flashbacks – in which a man reads her Twelfth Night as a child – to centre stage.

Moss gives a gung-ho performance. She is as watchable as ever as she quotes Shakespeare and smokes cigarettes with enthusiasm in the show’s two most unseemly tics. (“What country, friends, is this?” she says, puffing away and smiling at a refugee camp full of women fleeing genocide.)

But her character’s investigation into how her father, a British diplomat, died decades ago while there’s a dirty bomb to be tracked down makes little sense. The last two episodes are under strict embargo – so I won’t even hint at the television tropes she careens into next.

The Veil has a star and enough of a hook to grab you – and, at six episodes, seems algorithmically calculated to be short enough that you probably won’t give up if you start. Plus, there are all those shots of the Blue Mosque in Istanbul and the Eiffel Tower in Paris to remind you of the amount of money that was spent to shoot on location. You’d almost feel guilty turning it off.

A great series to binge, then whinge about then. These have their place and help you recognize the good stuff when it comes along.