Stream It Or Skip It: ‘The Veil’ On FX/Hulu, Where Elisabeth Moss Is A Spy Who Gains The Trust Of A French ISIS Agent

One of the reasons we’ve enjoyed Elisabeth Moss’ career is the way she’s always able to elevate her dialogue with an impish grin, the arch of an eyebrow, or just the way she tilts her head. She has a natural expressiveness that comes through in her acting, and that expressiveness makes her characters more real, even if she’s putting on an accent. In a new thriller on FX on Hulu (for which she serves as an EP), Moss gets us to believe she’s a British spy who is playing a game of cat and mouse with a woman who may or may not be an ISIS killer.

THE VEIL: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: A woman walks down a hallway. We first see her face, then see the sky-high heels she’s wearing.

The Gist: The woman sits with a man who tells her that everything’s set in Berlin. Then the woman coldly informs her that everything they’ve talked about over the last month-plus she’s recorded and sent to Interpol. As Interpol agents come to arrest the man, the woman leaves, calls her contact and says she’s like to have the name Imogen on her next operation, in Turkey.

In a snowy UN refugee camp on the border of Syria and Turkey, a crowd of mostly women mob a truck carrying food. As the women empty the truck, one of them recognizes Adilah El Idrissi (Yumna Marwan), shouting that she’s an ISIS agent named Daesh. Soldiers pull Adilah out of the mob before they beat her to death and string her up.

Not long after that, Imogen Salter (Elisabeth Moss) shows up at the camp. She’s an MI6 agent who is acting as a handler for Malik Amar (Dali Benssalah) a French DGSE agent. She claims to the director of the site that she’s there to lend a helping hand. When she suddenly remembers that her birthday has just passed and she needs to go to the comms shack to call her mother, the site director immediately becomes suspicious.

She asks the guy manning the comms to leave, because she’s really calling Malik. The only reason why she’s there is to bring Adilah El Idrissi back to Paris. She may or may not be the Genie of Raqqa, one of the few female ISIS agents around. But the first thing she needs to do is find Adilah and gain a bit of her trust. Through various events, including Imogen helping to fend off an attack, plus a little blackmail, Imogen manages to get Adilah in a car to take her to wherever the rendezvous point is.

But as they drive, Imogen wants to talk about families and other stuff that she considers important and not boring. She finds out that Adilah left behind a 10-year-old in Paris. Her claim is that, yes, she was trained by ISIS, but she helped the captive Yazidi women escape their clutches; she says she never killed anyone, and in fact once ISIS finds out she’s alive, they’ll come to kill her.

In the meantime, Malik briefs his boss on the operation, and his boss informs him that the “most American American America has ever produced.” That is Max Peterson (Josh Charles), a CIA agent. When Malik greets him at the airport, there is immediate conflict; somehow, Max has tapped into the tracker the DGSE has on Imogen and is watching it on his phone. He also knows that Malik and Imogen have had a personal relationship in the recent past. Finally, he hates the French. After wrestling in the middle of the airport over Max’s cell phone, Max tells Malik that the Americans are taking over the operation.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? The Veil kind of feels like Homeland–lite, with a weird mix of The Good Wife‘s sense of humor — especially when Josh Charles shows up.

Our Take: Something about the first hour of The Veil, written by Steven Knight (Peaky Blinders), feels off, despite the presence of Moss and Charles. It’s not that the stakes are low; her intelligence might stave off an impending attack on a Western target. For some reason, it just doesn’t feel hefty enough of a story for the time it’s being given.

What do we mean by that? Much of the story of The Veil is going to revolve around Imogen, who’s career is built around going undercover and her preternatural ability to get targets to trust her, and Adilah doing this dance of trust with each other. They’re going to tell each other some truths and some lies, and the two of them are going to have to figure out which are which. In the meantime the “ugly American” Max is going to steamroll the DGSE, as much as Malik may resist it, and automatically assume that Adilah is the killer they’re after.

That feels like the plot of a tense two-hour feature film, but not a series that spreads itself across six 45-minute episodes. It feels like there’s going to be a lot of talking, a lot of staring in the distance, and a lot of padded action without much plot momentum.

But Moss sold us on her playing a spy who has no idea who she really is at this point. We thought that her accent would grate on us, but as she showed us on Top Of The Lake, the accent becomes less distracting as we see her lean into her usual expressiveness. There’s just something about how she brings a combination of seriousness and a little bit of impishness to Imogen that makes her more appealing than the usual self-serious spies we see on shows like these. And as soon as Charles hits the screen, cursing and saying “dude,” we know exactly the kind of character he’s going to play.

It’s why we’re sticking with the show despite a first episode that left us mostly cold. Between Knight’s writing and the show’s stars, there feels like there is potential for some action-packed episodes. But we’re just not sure if anything will materialize just yet.

Sex and Skin: Nothing in the first episode.

Parting Shot: Imogen drives away from a truck stop with Adilah, saying “I have no idea what comes next.” Then she thinks about a man telling her “Begin” as we see a reflection of her in the rearview mirror.

Sleeper Star: James Purefoy plays the man that tells Imogen to “Begin,” and we know that his presence almost always lifts whatever part of the story he’s in.

Most Pilot-y Line: When Imogen was walking around the camp, we just wanted to reach through the screen and zip her parka, like we tend to do when our kid goes out in the winter with her coat open.

Our Call: STREAM IT. The jury is still out for us whether The Veil will be worth the time investment; on first glance there doesn’t seem to be enough story there, but Moss, Charles and Knight give us hope that things will pick up.

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.