The baddies reflect the worries of today Why TV spy thrillers are booming right now

From Netflix mega-hit The Night Agent to Apple TV+'s beloved Slow Horses, tales of secret agents and sinister plots are becoming ever more popular again. That's because they resonate with the times.

If you've sat down to watch a new TV series recently, there's a high chance that it has involved murders, sinister plots, cover-ups, moles, and at least one secret service agent trying to get to the bottom of it all.  

In recent months on the small screen, we've had an update of 1970s novel The Day of The Jackal, about the cat-and-mouse game between an assassin and an MI5 operative, and series four of Apple TV+'s brilliant comedy-drama about underdog agents, Slow Horses. There's been The Agency, the US adaptation of the French thriller Le Bureau des Légendes, and the slick London-based Netflix show Black Doves. And last week saw the premiere of both the second series of the conspiracy-laden The Night Agent, which was a huge hit on Netflix first time around, and new Apple TV+ series Prime Target, with season two of Netflix's The Recruit coming before the end of the month. There are so many spy thrillers on television at the moment that you might start to question if you're the only person in the world who's not an undercover agent.

Of course, the popularity of spy thrillers on TV is nothing new – they have long been a staple for broadcasters and streamers, much of which is down to the wealth of espionage literature. Spy novels first came into being at the beginning of the 19th Century, reflecting distrust around political and military conflicts of the time – see James Fenimore Cooper's 1821's The Spy: A Tale of the Neutral Ground, which explored tensions during the American Revolution and fears about Patriots being British spies.

Jumping forward in time, the genre really began to flourish during the 20th Century when two World Wars, followed by the Cold War, plus the creation of national intelligence agencies in the UK and US, provided fertile inspiration. In the Cold War period, British authors such as John le Carré and Len Deighton were big-hitters with celebrated works such as Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and The Ipcress File, while Ian Fleming created the blueprint for all future secret service agents with his James Bond series. Come the 80s and 90s, meanwhile, US spy novelist Tom Clancy became a global phenomenon with his Jack Ryan series.

Now, more than 200 years since popular spy-based literature was first printed, the appetite for spy thrillers has never been stronger. In the UK, the market for espionage novels grew a remarkable 45% in a year to £9.7 million ($12 million) in 2024, according to Nielsen BookData. Philip Stone, head of publisher account management  at Nielsen BookData, tells the BBC that, as well as it being boom times for the crime genre as a whole, such a huge uplift in sales of spy thrillers in particular is "in part due to the success of the adaptation of Mick Herron's Slough House series" – the basis for Apple TV+'s Slow Horses.

Given the big ratings for some of the spy shows on TV – season one of The Night Agent was Netflix's seventh most-watched show ever, with 98.2 million views – it's clear, too, that it's not only readers but viewers who are heavily invested in tales of double-crossing, whistle-blowing counter-surveillance. But why is the genre having a particularly successful resurgence right now?