Stream It Or Skip It: ‘The Recruit’ On Netflix, Where Noah Centineo Plays A Rookie CIA Lawyer Who Gets In Over His Head In The Spy World

One of the hallmarks of the ABC franchise The Rookie is that both shows have utterly charming leads actors and more than enough entertainingly light content to make viewers forget about the inherently ridiculous procedural parts of the shows. Alexi Hawley, the showrunner of both The Rookie and The Rookie: Feds has created a new series that centers around a new CIA lawyer who wastes no time in getting embroiled in some of the agency’s touchiest operations. Does it have the same light touch as Hawley’s other shows?

THE RECRUIT: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: Special ops forces dressed in winter camouflage train their guns on a site where a woman is driving in for a meet. Meanwhile, behind a truck, a guy is peeing in the snow and singing “Trouble.”

The Gist: Owen Hendricks (Noah Centineo) sees something going wrong and tries to call the commander, but she orders him to get off the line. “This is what happens when we bring a lawyer on an op,” she says. So he takes matters in to his own hands.

Two weeks earlier, Hendricks, who joined the CIA’s general counsel’s office straight out of law school, is on his second day on the job. He’s ordered by the general counsel, Walter Nyland (Vondie Curtis-Hall) to go to Capital Hill to keep Senate Intelligence Committee chairman Senator Smoot (Linus Roache) from reading classified documents into the public record.

Two veteran lawyers, Lester (Colton Dunn) and Violet (Aarti Mann), get wind of this and decide to give the rookie some scut work, namely hundreds of letters from “Crazies” who grey mail the agency and threaten them; his job is to assess if the threat is real. Most of them aren’t, but he sees a letter from Max Meladze (Laura Haddock), serving a stint for murder in Arizona. With help from extremely paranoid colleague Janus Ferber (Kristian Bruun), he looks into the operations she named in the letter.

What she finds out is the contact and ops name are real, but something that an asset shouldn’t know about. When he reports it to Nyland, he tells Hendricks to continue and gives Lester and Violet the crazies file back. When Hendricks decides he should go to Yemen to find Meladze’s former operative himself, the pair don’t give him any advice other than to “fly coach.” That gets him in trouble — and loses him a fingernail — when he goes unannounced to the black site where the operative is stationed, without a passport that would grant him diplomatic immunity.

But the operative eventually tells him more about Melazde, and he goes to Arizona to talk to her. She claims she has classified documents and sends him to a storage unit to retrieve them, but it ends up being a bag of money that two thugs chase and beat him to get. But he manages to get away, and lets Melazde know that she needs him more than she’s letting on. She also gives him the nickname of her handler, a nickname that she shouldn’t know; Ferber tells Hendricks that it refers to someone that’s extraordinarily high up in the government.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? It’s not a stretch to say that the comedy-thriller vibe of The Recruit reminds us of a network series like The Rookie but with more swearing. So it’s not a surprise that Alexi Hawley, who is a writer/showrunner for The Rookie and The Rookie: Feds is the creator of The Recruit.

Our Take: When we watched the first episode of The Recruit, we got the nagging feeling that the version of the CIA that Hawley is giving viewers is one that doesn’t exist. Hendricks is a lawyer, not a spy, but it seems that this series is going to be full of situations where this rookie with no experience either stumbles upon or actually digs up big and dangerous situations that he ends up insinuating himself into.

What we’re not sure is if this is being set up this way because Hendricks is just that good at digging up information other lawyers in that office can’t, or that he’s the beneficiary of simple dumb luck. As it is, we doubt that people from the general counsel’s office are winging their way to Yemen to interview people at black sites.

All that being said, Centineo is credible as an enthusiastic rookie who seems to thrive on constantly being in over his head, and he has a good asset/foe in Haddock as Melazde. He’s even ballsy enough to live with his ex Hannah (Fivel Stewart) and her new boyfriend Terence (Daniel Quincy Annoh). Centineo has gotten past his YA heartthrob image from Netflix romcom films and plays Hendricks as a guy who might not always fit the mold of a tough CIA operative, but he always seems to be in the right place at the right time, even if his methods are clumsy at best and dangerous at worst.

The rest of the cast, including the usually-excellent trio of Dunn, Mann and Curtis-Hall, don’t have a ton to do in the first episode, but their roles are set up well enough to lead to interesting situations later on. We’re looking forward, though, to seeing more of Bruun as the extraordinarily paranoid Ferber (more on that in a second).

Sex and Skin: Nothing in the first episode, aside from Hendricks having his suit and shirt torn off by the operative in Yemen, right before she tore his fingernail out.

Parting Shot: Hendricks calls Melazde; if she can tell him the truth about whether she can be trusted, he’ll help her out. Her response: “When our interests align. Otherwise, no.” That’s enough for Hendricks to say, “I’m in.”

Sleeper Star: Bruun’s degree of comic relief as Ferber is different than what we see with Dunn and Mann; Lester and Violet are just co-workers threatened by this new go-getter, whereas Bruun just thinks that the operatives that he advises are out to drug him and execute ops that he is trying to stop. His paranoia, though, isn’t completely unfounded, which gives his character more depth than you might think.

Most Pilot-y Line: Hendricks’ story about his hand, even to Nyland, is that he “closed it in a car door.” Your fingernail will turn black before it falls off if that happens, and it takes a few days. So, he needs to come up with a better cover story.

Our Call: STREAM IT. The Recruit is a mostly silly show, but Centineo has more than enough charm to carry viewers through the more absurd parts of the season’s ongoing plot, and there are enough veteran actors in the supporting cast to make us think the comedy-thriller tone of the first episode will be able to be sustained for the entire season.

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, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.