Why can't we all binge The Bureau together?

When must-see TV is nearly impossible to find...

• Don’t you just love finding a TV show that you’ve never heard of, but, after just one episode, can’t stop thinking about? I’m like that with The Bureau, a super sexy French spy thriller that seems to have that exact effect on everyone who comes in contact with it. The only problem? In New Zealand, it’s incredibly difficult to watch. Let’s go…

Moody and broody, The Bureau is must-see TV. Good luck finding it.

Everyone is impossibly good looking. You could make precise architectural drawings using their angular chins and cheekbones. Haircuts are works of art that should be painted on portraits and hung in galleries. When they talk, they stare intensely before emoting sexy stabs of verbiage full of pregnant, poetic pauses.

They’re wide-eyed, moody, broody and so fucking intense. They gather around the office coffee machine that spits out tiny cups of espresso, swiveling their pointy hips in different directions while flirting over discussions about complex international political situations and dangerous missions involving deep-cover spies that have come unstuck.

Every single person in this show looks like they’re about to rip off their clothes and start going for it. They often do. At night, it’s all about restaurant dining, inter-office hook-ups, secret hotel liaisons and extra-marital affairs. One character has several phones and an air conditioning unit full of different passports to be able to pull all of this off.

Yes, they’re French. Of course they’re French. Did you not guess already? Everyone in The Bureau, or, as it’s known in France, Le Bureau des Légendes, is most definitely 100 per cent French. They’re also sexy super-spies, and they’re very, very good at what they do. Check it out, then we’ll talk further. Here’s the trailer for season one…

Intrigued? Me too. Right now, TV fans around the world are happily bingeing their way through The Bureau. Since 2015, five seasons of the StudioCanal show have been made, and a sixth is in the works. The show follows Malotru, a deep cover spy who struggles to return to normal life after six years of undercover work in Syria. He’s got kids, is divorced, and can’t quite quit his Damascus love interest, Nadia. She may also be a spy.

Their complicated, compromised relationship, once outed, has all kinds of political and inter-agency ramifications that play out over increasingly tense 10-episode seasons. Once you fall for The Bureau, you’ll fall hard. It’s incredibly addictive viewing. At home, in France, it’s huge. Long-running Paris newspaper Le Figaro has declared The Bureau the best French TV show ever made.

But its popularity isn’t limited to France. An American remake is in the works, according to The New York Times, and will probably be terrible, because that’s what America does to foreign shows with subtitles. That publication also ranks The Bureau third on its list of the best international shows of the decade.

Chris Ryan and Andy Greenwald, the podcasting team behind The Watch - an essential listen for TV fans - love The Bureau so much they dedicated three entire episodes to dissecting all five seasons of it. That’s definitely a fan obsession taken to an extreme.

Others suffer from the same obsession too. Just look at these headlines…

Sounds good, right? Too good to be true? Yep. I’m sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but, right now, you can’t watch a single sexy second of The Bureau. It isn’t available in New Zealand. It’s not on Netflix, Neon, Amazon Prime Video, Apple TV+ or Disney+. It’s not on TVNZ OnDemand, Acorn or ThreeNow. It looks like it maybe once screened on the Rialto Channel, because someone went to all the trouble of listing the episodes. But it’s not playing now.

I started asking all of the streaming services I could get hold of, and got nowhere, fast.

Neon told me: “We’ve never had this title and (have) no plans for it coming to Neon at this stage.”

TVNZ said: “No plans to acquire at this stage.”

Amazon Prime Video replied: “Not in the NZ schedule for the foreseeable future. Sorry!”

This blows. You can’t look at an international entertainment website or follow a TV critic on Twitter right now without stumbling over another impassioned convert, a disciple raving about the show’s mix of Homeland-style plot lines, international conspiracies and sexy spy antics. “It's confusing as hell, but you can't take your eyes off it,” said the Malibu Times. Agreed.

So sexy: the impossible jaw lines of the cast of The Bureau.

In all of this hype, I can’t help but be reminded of the late-2000s furor surrounding The Wire, Ed Burns and David Simons’ slow burn HBO cop show that took years for people to catch on to. Each season was made with the threat of cancellation hanging over its head. Now, The Wire is widely regarded as the greatest TV show ever made.

That kind of industry demolition job may not happen with The Bureau. For one, it’s subtitled, and as good superior Scandi-noir shows like The Bridge and The Killing are, some people just can’t multi-task. Watching TV and reading at the same time is too hard, you know? Those people are idiots, but those same people stop an international bevy of TV brilliance being rated alongside Breaking Bad and The Sopranos.

But the main problem stopping The Bureau being the world’s biggest show right now is an obvious one. In New Zealand at least, you can’t watch it. For something so beloved, and so hyped, the show’s scarcity is actually ridiculous. I managed to find a few dodgy streams of some first season episodes so I could do some research for this piece, but aside from that, the show’s just not available.

Overseas, everyone seems to be watching it via the streaming service Sundance Now. Visit that website in New Zealand and you’ll get this wonderful message…

Those of you who have advanced knowledge of geoblocking and VPNs may be able to get Sundance Now to work. I know of one person who is able to access SBS in Australia, where all five seasons are available for streaming, for free. But that requires some technical know-how, and many of us just can’t be bothered.

You didn’t read this far just to be disappointed. Rest assured, I have a solution. Your best bet to see The Bureau is to go old school. In the same way that we all watched The Wire back in the day, order the box set from Amazon, dig out your dusty old DVD player from the shed, spend two hours finding the right TV connection cable in that big box of wires you’ve got stashed in the attic, crank up the heat pump, order in cheese, croissants and red wine, slip in disc one of season one, and indulge in a big old sexy mid-winter bingeathon.

Trust me: It’s worth it just to see all those perfect French jaw lines and cheek bones in action. Bon visionnage, indeed.

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The iMax interview of my dreams…

Last week, I went full NZ Herald and turned on a paywall. It’s a nerve-wracking thing to do as a writer: of course I want as many people as possible to read my work, but I also have kids, a mortgage, and some furniture to replace after a cat caused $5000 worth of damage in a matter of minutes. LOL!

Anyway, my first paywalled piece is an interview with Ashley Allen, the architect who designed Auckland’s iMax building. It took me a while to organise that interview, so, after weeks of effort, it was wonderful to finally find out so many things about the building that I’d only been able to guess at.

Yes, his concepts were inspired by Blade Runner. Yes, Allen’s designed the stalled renovation plans. And yes, he has plenty of thoughts about the building’s current state. That piece is called: ‘It’s become a mish-mash of crap’. That’s his quote. He has lots more to say.

Here’s one of my favourite bits, about the time Allen first walked into the finished Sky World Entertainment Centre, the biggest project he’d ever dreamed up, had spent years working on, and would soon take him to India to design a dozen theatre complexes and a $1 billion mall…

If you’d like to read that newsletter in full, as well as all future subscriber-only posts, and help me keep this thing going, you can become a paid subscriber below. Thank you. Seriously…

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Everything else you need to worry about this week…

• Scarlett Johansson’s Black Widow movie opens on Friday, and reviews have been solid. “Black Widow becomes, kind of stirringly, a movie not about franchise extension but sisterhood, improvised families and traumatic pasts,” wrote AP’s Jake Coyle. Best of all, you can watch it in Event Broadway’s re-opened cinema for just $10!

• I have to be honest: after surviving a year full of virus and lockdown scares, a murder-zombie pandemic show was not on my must-see TV list. But I am loving the shit out of Black Summer, Netflix’s answer to The Walking Dead that manages to do in two seasons what that show couldn’t over 11: scare me. It’s just one long brilliant bottle episode with absolutely no flashbacks, …

• On Wednesday, Taskmaster NZ’s second season begins screening and I am hearing very good things about the performances of this year’s contestants: Matt Heath, Urzila Carlson, Laura Daniel, David Correos and Guy Montgomery. You can read my behind-the-scenes interview with the Taskmaster NZ comedy crew here.

• Put half an hour aside to read the New Yorker’s incredibly detailed story, Britney Spears’s conservatorship nightmare. In it, journalists Ronan Farrow and Jia Tolentino piece together exactly why the pop star’s stuck in a never-ending conservatorship time loop. With hidden sauna cellphones, seriously twisted quotes and a grim portrayal of her dad Jamie Spears, it’s as horrifying as we all imagined.

• Finally, Disney+ seems to have realised that putting all of its unfertilised frog eggs into one Baby Yoda basket isn’t going to work, so it’s expanding its library with some more spin-offs. Here’s the trailer for Monsters at Work, a series based on the movies that reunites the original voice cast. My daughter is hyped…

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