What do TV and movies get right when it comes to espionage?
TV doesn’t spend much time trying to get too much right about espionage, which after all, in many ways, is not as flashy as they need to attract viewership. Movies are probably in two categories. Some of the newer ones, like The Good Shepherd or Charlie Wilson’s War, try to get it very accurate when it comes down to everything from the organization to the set decoration to the way that people say things to props and on and on. The other category is where CIA is sort of the underlying theme, like the Bourne movies. Not as much attention is paid to detail, but the movie is carried very well on its own. They don’t go out of their way to make CIA into a great evil thing. The whole Bourne thing is just a really entertaining yarn. Oh, and there’s a third kind out there that I think is disappearing. The “this is how your government is trying to do you in”-type story, which I think Oliver Stone put together in JFK. Does a movie in the spy genre have to be accurate to be good? No. I went to CIA
