After all the teasers, promos, the prods to Tweet @NBCAllegiance, the network’s latest spy drama premieres Thursday at 10 p.m. EST.
The marketing masterminds at the Peacock Network have worked hard to get viewers jazzed about its set-in-modern-day spy drama that piggybacks on the popularity of FX’s period spy drama “The Americans,” which had its third season premiere Wednesday night.
“It’s really good. A lot of them aren’t,” confided one of the hosts, who guided a few members of the media into the International Spy Museum for an early screening of the premiere for NBC executives and their guests, museum members and real-life spies.
The show centers on a family in modern-day Brooklyn consisting of a Russian-born wife (Hope Davis), an American-born husband (Scott Cohen), their two daughters and a brilliant son, who is a newly mined CIA analyst assigned to a case that involves his own family.
The husband and wife — members of a dormant Russian sleeper cell — are strong-armed into luring their son into spying. After seeing the first episode, the entire series may turn out to be a wilder, more nuanced ride than perhaps even AMC’s “Breaking Bad.”
One major strength is that the main characters are believable, just as real spies should be. Not too pretty, not too glib, not too — let’s say it — Hollywood.
“It is a real positive for awareness,” said Peter Earnest, founding executive director of the spy museum and a 35-year veteran of the CIA. “We may look at [television spy dramas] and think, ’Isn’t that quaint?’ But there are people wandering around today that have true hidden agendas,” he said. “Even though the Cold War ended in 1991 when the Soviet Union dissolved we are looking at a new world order, as President George H.W. Bush said.”
One of the key elements of that order is the highly centralized Russian government under President Vladimir Putin, which uses what Mr. Earnest and others call “Mafia-like tactics” to control the media and others.
“Many Americans and people in Europe sometimes do not understand that Russia in the past decade [has changed significantly] since Putin took over,” said author and former KGB Gen. Oleg Kalugin, who was Mr. Putin’s superior for several years before he defected to the U.S. “Under [the leadership of others, including Mikhail Gorbachev], it made serious advances toward a democratic state. Today, Russia is run by the KGB. Western nations took a very soft attitude toward [Mr. Putin], and so, unfortunately, you see what is happening now under his regime.”
Whatever the state of international relations, author and former longtime intelligence analyst Mark Stout said intelligence activities are always robust.
“Espionage goes on all the time, and the show portrays that without getting into the specifics of the U.S. and Russian relations today,” he said, heaping praise on the show’s characterization of the layers of intelligence activities and conflicts among agencies. “I like that an analyst is at the heart of it.”
As does Vince Houghton, historian and curator at the spy museum, who said the entertainment industry’s focus on James Bond and other flashy, high-profile operatives gives a slanted view of the complex intelligence network.
Mr. Houghton hopes people watching the show will say that “being an analyst is something I could do with my life.”
He said the Mensa-like intelligence of the analyst in “Allegiance” is not a prerequisite to such a career. “Very few people at any agency, anywhere, have eidetic memories [allowing for extraordinary vivid recall]. Clearly, they aren’t pulled from the dregs of society — they are scholars, top academics — but they don’t memorize 406 pages of a briefing in two hours. Each of them has their own special skills. Intelligence doesn’t happen without analysts.”
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