'A Spy Among Friends' is A Spy Series Among The Best

We're over half a century from the 1960s when there were only five major Hollywood studios, and audiences recognized them by name and filming brand. However, despite decades of entertainment realignment, a few remain: Disney instantly calls to mind princesses, for example, and Warner Bros., the home of musicals and fantasy. MGM only has one brand left now, but it's a biggie: James Bond, the elegantly refined British spy. When Amazon purchased the studios outright, it was to obtain that franchise. So perhaps it is not a surprise that the streaming service that came with that sale, now branded MGM+, kicks off with an espionage thriller in a similar vein, A Spy Among Friends.

Though the series is no match for Ian Flemings' exotic locales and punnily named women, the real-life story behind it is almost so unbelievable you might think it fiction. Harold Adrian Russell Philby, known to his friends as Kim, was a British intelligence officer and double agent for the USSR. He was nearly caught in 1951 when two other spies, Donald Maclean, and Guy Burgess, defected, and MI-5 fingered him as the one who tipped him off. But Philby's inside connections and gentleman spy friends stood by him, eventually exonerating him until 1961 when Anatoliy Golitsyn defected and fingered him as guilty.

Philby should have been caught then; history records his alcoholism has reached such levels that taking him in would have been easy. Instead, the same upper-class old boys network that insisted on his innocence the first time let him slip away to Moscow, where he lived the rest of his life. A Spy Among Friends begins with this ending, as Kim Philby (Guy Pearce) is caught, and BFF Nicholas Elliott (Damien Lewis), a member of the British Secret Intelligence Service, aka MI-6, is tasked with obtaining a full confession instead of neighboring MI-5 and is then forced to explain how he was allowed to escape.