A gleaming example of how to have your cake and scoff it in one go: why Killing Eve is the best British thriller in years

Off-beat, often funny, occasionally chilling, Killing Eve is one of the year’s outstanding small screen thrillers – but also so much more. Finally arriving on BBC One after debuting to thunderous acclaim on BBC America last spring, this cat and mouse spy caper stars Jodi Comer as a sociopathic lady assassin and Sandra Oh – the “Eve” of the title – as the disorganised yet intuitive MI5 operative on her tail. 

The first clue that Killing Eve aspires to more than reheated John le Carré is that it flows from the mordant pen of Phoebe Waller-Bridge. Just as she reconfigured the Millennial comedy-of-manners with her bleak and hilarious first hit Fleabag, with Killing Eve she simultaneously celebrates the jet-setting secret agent romp – she is, you suspect, partial to the occasional Roger Moore Bond box set – even as she gleefully deconstructs it. 

So while Comer’s globe-trotting and glamorous Oksana Astankova is at one level a character straight from a Sixties spy novel, she is in the same breath presented as a complicated mess – just as a killer who represses their feelings would be in the real world. That wouldn’t work without super-sharp writing from Waller-Bridge, or a searingly nuanced performance from Comer, set to become a star on the back of the praise heaped on Killing Eve in the US. 

Her antagonist, Eve, meanwhile feels like a one-woman riposte to self-serious school of thriller as, paradoxically, represented by the BBC’s other big hit of the autumn, Bodyguard. In Jed Mercurio's straight-faced blockbuster, MI5 is at some level involved in a conspiracy to unseat a Government minister who knows too much – it is a ruthless organisation casting a nefarious shadow over the body politic.

Eve, by contrast, is the David Brent of top-level sleuthing. She certainly isn’t terrible at her job. In fact, it is she who recognises the threat posed by new-killer- on-the-block Villanelle – Astankova’s professional alias –  as her superiors blunder on in ignorance. 

Yet she is also flawed and slightly absurd. When details of one of Astankova’s killings are relayed at a meeting, she blurts out “cool”. Eve is character from the world of comedy rather than furrow-browed drama as epitomised by Bodyguard, which, for all its suspenseful qualities, clearly had its humour chip removed at inception. 

The quirkiness doesn’t make the stakes feel any lower, it is worth noting. After all, it isn’t often a scene in which two characters exchange one-liners over microwaved shepherd’s pie garners comparisons to Scorsese and Michael Mann’s Heat. But those are some of the less hyperbolic plaudits rested at the feet of Killing Eve as it became a word-of-mouth sensation in America.

The gushing was justified, as anyone who has watched the sequence in which flustered Eve finds herself opposite the dining table from her stylish nemesis. After a protracted game of cat and mouse, hunter and prey – the series is ambivalent as to which of the spooks ultimately occupies which role – are finally face to face. This isn’t their first meeting but it is presented as a showdown and the high-wire tension is beyond knuckle-whitening.  

“You’re an a***hole… Exceptionally bright… an extraordinary person… a psychopath," Eve tells Astankova as the other woman merrily devours her host’s shepherd's pie. (Comer was required to eat the dish in such quantities that artificial shepherd’s pie substitute was utilised, to spare her reflux and stomach ache.) 

Astankova stops chomping and a smirk dances across her mouth. She tells Eve that it is foolish to diagnose a psychopath to their face. When Eve quizzes the assassin about her predilection for castration, her opponent draws up and nods towards Eve’s outfit. “Can we get one thing clear before we go on with this? Is that a sweater attached to a shirt? Is it two separate pieces? How does it work?”

The line as written down is funny – a non-sequitur to shatter the suspense. Comer makes it the most terrifying dialogue you will hear all year. 

After Fleabag became an unexpected hit on Amazon Prime in the US, Waller-Bridge had her pick of projects. In a thrillingly quixotic move, she decided to adapt (and executive produce) an obscure series of crime novels about a Russian hit woman. 

Though largely faithful to Luke Jennning’s original Codename Villanelle saga, Waller-Bridge’s thumb-prints are all over Killing Eve. In a master class of having your cake and eating it, she finds a way to be be simultaneously hilarious and suspenseful, knockabout and blood-curdling.

The true driving force, though, is the extraordinary dynamic between the actresses playing yin and yang antagonists. Oh (aka Cristina Yang from Grey’s Anatomy) is magnificently everyday as Eve. The character is an MI5 pen pusher who spices up her dreary existence by swapping lunches with her boss – sushi for shepherd’s pie. She communicates ongoing bafflement, as any pen pusher would, when drawn into a Da Vinci Code-esque international conspiracy centred on a sinister international cabal (“The Twelve”) and their killer queen, Villanelle/Oksana. 

The real revelation, however, is Comer, hitherto best known as the airhead other woman in Doctor Foster. She is way past chilling as Astankova – a sociopath with a streak of self-awareness and a disconcerting sense of humour (as signalled in an early scene in which, having failed to elicit a smile from a young girl, she knocks over the child’s ice-cream). 

We expect our international killers to be ruthless and bled dry of personality. Astankova is certainly the first, as is confirmed an early scene in which she uses a child to lure a grandfather to his death (by poisoned-hair-pin-through-the-eye, naturally). 

Yet she is also in on the joke regarding her life as jet-set knife in the dark. In her first encounter with Eve, she advises her future adversary to wear her hair down; when she corners a later target she explains she wants to kill him in the loo because she “has a thing about bathrooms”. 

Comer had to audition for the part and, if obscure in the UK, was absolutely unheard of in the United States when Killing Eve premiered, on BBC America, last April. 

She has since had a rise to quasi-stardom that makes Waller-Bridge's ascent seem like a 19th-century trek across Antartica. The 25 year-old has has been feted in American Vogue – “rivalling Rihanna in statement-making style” – and interviewed by Vanity Fair (albeit in the most condescending fashion, with the publication phonetically recreating her “thick Liverpudlian accent”).

Around these two whirlwinds, Waller-Bridge and BBC America – actually, a partnership between the BBC’s commercial arm and US network AMC – has constructed a thriller that serves as a gleaming example of how to have your cake and scoff it in one go. 

When Oh’s on screen, the tone is wry and knockabout (her staid but loving relationship with her Polish husband is milked for every last chuckle). 

But as the focus shifts to Oksana, Killing Eve sweeps us off our feet and off to a Ian Fleming fantasia of international travel, vintage soundtracks and hip title cards announcing the anti-hero’s latest glamorous destination (it’s not often you want to swoon over a programme’s excellent typography). 

Killing Eve didn’t create much of a splash initially. However, driven by word of mouth and a 100 per cent Rotten Tomatoes rating, viewership in the US has climbed from 669,000 for the premier to 900,000 for part five (aka the one with the shepherd’s pie standoff).  For a show to build an audience in that fashion is essentially unprecedented in modern TV – and places it ahead of fancied rivals such as Legion on FX. 

Along with all that, Killing Eve makes a virtue of its Britishness, with a Carnaby Street swagger that never panders to the sort of reductive American anglophilia where everyone either wears a top hat or speaks like Vinny Jones. 

In evoking a contemporary London in which a spy with a Canadian accent can be married to a Pole who speaks with an Irish accent the series also captures the multi-faceted reality of life in modern Britain.  Now it’s finally come home – and devotees of tense, sophisticated drama will wonder how they managed so long without it. 

 Killing Eve begins on BBC One at 9.15pm on Saturday 15 September. Episodes will be available on iPlayer shortly after broadcast