Created by spy-fiction novelist Olen Steinhauer, “Berlin Station,” now on Epix, is a tense, terse thriller — good-looking but never fussy, balancing character and plot in satisfying proportions, a new suit cut to classic lines.
Though it begins in a burst of action, the storm before the flashback, its early hours are taken up mostly with talking and walking and lurking. It builds on the expectation, learned from growing up with movies, that bad things happen when we least expect them.
CIA agent Daniel Miller (Richard Armitage, who spent three seasons in “MI-5”) believes he has identified the go-between between an anonymous whistle-blower and the journalist publishing embarrassing-to-the-U.S. revelations in the German press.
Sent to the agency’s Berlin office undercover, Daniel finds himself in complicated company, including station head (Richard Jenkins), who is not quite ready to admit he’s done with his job; administrator Valerie Edwards (Michelle Forbes), who is ready to take his place; deputy chief Robert Kirsch (Leland Orser), whose constant abrasiveness would ordinarily mean he’ll turn out all right in the end; and agent Hector DeJean (Rhys Ifans), an old associate of Daniel’s who seems to be going to pieces.
