Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Intelligence’ On Peacock, Where David Schwimmer’s Brash NSA Agent Tries To Take Over A Nerdy British Cyber Security Group

Peacock, NBCUniversal’s new streaming service, is kicking off with a ton of catalog content and a few originals. One of the interesting things about the originals is that the scripted ones are more or less British in origin. Some are true originals but others, like Nick Mohammed’s Intelligence, have already aired back in the UK — it premiered on Sky One in February and has already been renewed for a second season. It does help that David Schwimmer stars in this series, which might help slightly ease the sting of not having reruns of Friends on their service (it’s on HBO Max). But is the show any good?

INTELLIGENCE: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: “GCHQ CENTRE FOR CYBER SECURITY.” A man is spinning a Rubik’s Cube for a co-worker, when another turns around and says, “You didn’t borrow my memory stick, did you? It’s got a picture of a vagina on it.”

The Gist: The GCHQ is the UK’s Government Communications Headquarters. The Cyber Security unit investigates cyber crime happening domestically and abroad, but the unit isn’t a globetrotting group of special agents; they’re nerdy hackers and coders that sit in front of screens all day. It’s led by Christine Clark (Sylvestra Le Touzel), a veteran intelligence officer. Her main people are master hacker Tuva Olson (Gana Bayarsaikhan) — the one with the vagina memory stick — squirrelly cryptoanalyst Mary Needham (Jane Stanness) and Joseph Harries (Nick Mohammed), an obsequious and bumbling computer analyst.

While they’re tracking down important cases, like one involving a massive bank, an American NSA agent named Jerry Bernstein (David Schwimmer), who will be a liason between the NSA and the GCHQ. We see how obnoxious he is from the first seconds of his arrival, when he blocks everyone behind him on an airport people mover. He’s such a control freak that he drives his taxi to GCHQ. And he’s also racist; when Joseph — a big fan — gets Jerry’s bags and is stopped at security, Jerry automatically thinks it’s because Joseph is brown (He actually doesn’t say this, he just points at his own face in a circle to indicate it).

As soon as Jerry gets into the office, he starts taking over, giving people tasks and ordering the temperature to be 71 degrees instead of 74 (he also calls the air conditioner the “air con” instead of “AC”). Chris is none too happy about this, of course, and resents the brash American thinking this is his group to take over just because he’s American.

We do see that Jerry has an insecure streak below the arrogance, as he has to psyche himself up in his office whenever he gets dressed down by Chris. And, when Joseph can’t seem to use his pass card to get Jerry to the bathroom, Jerry freaks out. He also loves his mom, which we’re sure will come up later. With Joseph’s help, he later tries to get the group to do a team-building exercise while Chris is at an off-site meeting. By the time she gets back, everyone is blindfolded and touching each other, telling each other about the last time they had sex. Chris is incensed, but Jerry does get her to eat a jellybean out of the huge container he brought as a welcome gift, a container everyone has had their hands in by then.

Our Take: You have to give Nick Mohammed, who created Intelligence and is the show’s top-billed star along with Schwimmer, credit for the chutzpah he had to marry the traditional workplace comedy to the ubiquitous spy genre, dumb everyone down, write a jerk-off role and get Schwimmer to play it. The first episode worked more often than it didn’t, simply because everyone embodies their parts so well.

Schwimmer obviously has the chops to pull off a multi-layered character like Jerry, who seems like an arrogant, jingoistic American prick at first blush, but he more than likely is a cog in the NSA machine that hasn’t gotten the appreciation he thinks he deserves over a 25-year career. He’s also a fabulist, as we see when he shows Joseph what he says is a bullet hole, even after Joseph recognizes it as a lipoma surgery scar.

Like classic workplace comedies, we only know a few characters at first, but they’re certainly the most colorful ones. But there’s other people in the office, and we wouldn’t be surprised if we get to know a few more of them as the season goes on. We especially appreciated the position Mohammed puts Sylvestra Le Touzel in as Chris. Her character isn’t powerless by any means; she’ll constantly have clashes with Jerry, and they’ll likely get more explosive as time goes on. But she knows who she has in her unit, despite her frustrations with how silly they can be sometimes. We’ll be interested in seeing how she defends her crew, especially if Jerry and Joseph team up to toss her aside.

Sex and Skin: Nothing, except for that team-building exercise.

Parting Shot: Jerry tells everyone to fall down, and Mary falls on the printer, which starts working for the first time in days. It starts spitting out pictures of Matthew McConaughey, whose browsing history Joseph just “happened” to come across in his research (he apparently likes searching for yard equipment). Then we see Joseph shredding all of his McConaughey pictures.

Sleeper Star: Eliot Salt plays Evelyn, Chris’ inept secretary who somehow still has a job despite not being able to do a damn thing for her boss. It seems obvious she knows someone or something.

Most Pilot-y Line: “It’ll be a pleasure collaborating with one of our oldest and closest allies,” says Chris more than once. You know that’s code for, “Oh, shit, another American asshole.” The Brits are so polite, aren’t they?

Our Call: STREAM IT. While Intelligence’s first episode could have been a skosh funnier, Mohammed, Schwimmer and the rest of the cast do such a strong job of embodying their characters that we’re eager to see where things go.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, VanityFair.com, Playboy.com, Fast Company.com, RollingStone.com, Billboard and elsewhere.

Stream Intelligence On Peacock