TL;DR – This is a delightfully fun romp through the world of espionage with a leading man finding himself in all the wrong places at all the right times.  

Disclosure – I paid for the Netflix service that viewed this series.

The Recruit Review –

I have to say that when I first heard about The Recruit, I was kind of a bit tired of the overall spy genre. Add to that, it was led by Noah Centineo, who I had never seen as a leading man before, and the constraints of the end of the year. Well, I was happy to give this a pass. But something niggled in the back of my head, and part of me had to see what was going on here and look. I am the first to admit I was wrong.

So to set the scene, Owen Hendricks (Noah Centineo) is a brand new lawyer for the general counsel’s office of the CIA. Most jobs make you feel like you are in over your head when you start. The CIA takes that to a whole new level when all of your colleagues are also trying to sabotage you. To prove himself and because people wanted him to fail, he takes on the grey mail. These are letters from people threatening the CIA. 99% of them are not threats, but in his first week, Owen has to find the one credible letter. Max Meladze (Laura Haddock) is locked in a Phoenix prison for caving a guy’s head in with a tyre wrench. But she also knows code word clearance intelligence and might just be able to destroy all the CIA’s operations in Belarus and Russia. Owen is happy to find the threat but less comfortable when he is tasked by his boss Walter Nyland (Vondie Curtis-Hall), to take care of it, and then quite put off when that leads to him getting his fingernail ripped off in a ruin in Yemen. Now from here, we will be looking at the season as a whole, so there will be some [SPOILERS] ahead.