Hulu's 2024 Spy Series is a Must-Watch for Any Homeland Fan (Despite Earning Only 47% on Rotten Tomatoes)

Summary

• A week ago, a new series by Steven Knight premiered on Hulu.
• It's a spy thriller in the vein of Homeland.
• While critics were cold to the show, many appreciated Elisabeth Moss' acting (but not her accent!).

It's 2024 and one of the best British television personalities, Steven Knight, is in business like never before! Yes, admittedly, his projects these days are not as critically acclaimed as Peaky Blinders, but they always boast a high level of production and, of course, an excellent cast, which has never been wrong with Knight's TV series.

Last year's All the Light We Cannot See delighted us with the talent of young actors like Louis Hofmann and Aria Mia Loberti, as well as Hollywood colossi Hugh Laurie and Mark Ruffalo, while this March the BBC released This Town, led by the excellent British cast of Levi Brown, Jordan Bolger, Ben Rose and Eve Austin.

And the star of the new series, which is now streaming on Hulu, is none other than Elisabeth Moss, along with other equally stellar cast members that we will talk about below. Although the show has failed to impress critics so far, it is still a great story that is worth watching for both fans of Ms. Moss and fans of Homeland-style espionage stories.

What Is This Show with Elisabeth Moss?

We're talking about The Veil, which debuted on FX on Hulu on April 30, 2024 with two 40-minute episodes.

If spy thrillers aren't new to you, you're probably familiar with the series Homeland, starring Claire Danes and Damian Lewis. In essence, it was a cat-and-mouse game between a CIA officer and a former Marine, who is now believed to have been recruited by terrorists. And of course, the main question of the first seasons was whether this was true, or if it was just the paranoia of CIA agents.

The Veil has a similar premise. The series follows Elisabeth Moss as a veteran MI6 agent Imogen Salter (don't ask us why Knight and his team couldn't hire a British actress to play a British spy, we don't know; but Moss is as stunning as ever), who has been sent to the border between Turkey and Syria to bring one Adilah El Idrissi (Yumna Marwan) back to Paris. She may be a secret agent of ISIS. Or she may not, who knows how things will turn out?

A parallel storyline of confrontation between the American CIA and the French DGSE develops as The Good Wife star Josh Charles appears as a decidedly caricatured American who gets on the nerves of the French and tries to get Adilah's case into the clutches of the CIA alone.

What Do Critics and Viewers Say about It?

As far as the audience is concerned, the series has literally polarized the opinions of ordinary viewers: on IMDb, for example, you will only find either strongly positive or strongly negative opinions. According to Rotten Tomatoes, however, the negatives outweigh the positives: while the critics' score is predictably low at 44%, the audience score is not much higher at 52%.

The problem is that despite the excellent actors who carry this series, the story does not do a good enough job of providing enough motivation to invest in it. It's not that the plot isn't engaging, but it might be a bit too stretched for a six-episode series.

Then, of course, there's Moss' accent! The actress undoubtedly won the hearts of the audience with her portrayal of a person who hides many secrets behind her psychopathic grin, but the terrible accent proved to be too distracting for many.

The third episode of The Veil is already available on Hulu, while the fourth will be released on May 14, 2024.