‘Allegiance’ Espionage hits home in new NBC show

By Steven Zeitchik

Los Angeles Times

NEW YORK

When the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, happened, Scott Cohen recalls, the actor’s son Liam was just 5 years old and had a particularly traumatizing view of the day’s events.

“He was sitting in his first-grade classroom in downtown Manhattan, watching it right from the window,” Cohen said. “I can’t imagine the fright, the fear — what you do with that, what it does to you.”

Cohen has the chance to explore that question and many other psychological and political ones in his new series “Allegiance.” Equal parts espionage thriller and family drama, the cable-style NBC series — which also stars Hope Davis — will debut Feb. 5 after the network’s similarly oriented hit “The Blacklist.”

Creator George Nolfi (“The Adjustment Bureau”) adapted the show from an Israeli drama, taking a look at the modern intelligence world via Russian and U.S. spies — who, oh, yes, also happen to be part of the same family.

When the series begins, Mark and Katya O’Connor (Cohen and Davis), a U.S. businessman and a deactivated KGB agent, are living an anodyne life as a married couple in suburban New York. Their daughter has been brought into the Kremlin-centric family business while, on the other end of the spectrum, son Alex (Gavin Stenhouse) is a brilliant and idealistic 24-year-old who came of age in the wake of Sept. 11 and now works for the CIA, oblivious to his mother’s past.

The family’s complicated loyalties quickly end up on a collision course, as an agent from the Russian security agency SVR seeks to reactivate Katya and conscript her for a massive terrorist attack on her adopted country. Meanwhile, Alex is assigned to root out the very plot that his Russian-spy mother has been tasked with carrying out. “Allegiance,” in essence, is a post-9/11 series with a Cold War spin.

“I wanted to create a show of people caught in a vise, between satisfying their handlers and not betraying the country they call home,” Nolfi said. “Like many people in the modern world, the O’Connors don’t have a blind allegiance to one ideology or country. They’re struggling with the cross-currents.”

The filmmaker, who also wrote “The Bourne Ultimatum,” studied subjects such as policy and diplomacy at Princeton and UCLA. He has been active on geopolitical issues for years and drew on dozens of friends and contacts in the foreign-relations world to craft “Allegiance.” (Nolfi serves as creator and show runner and is its main creative driving force.)

By upending traditional television lines between Russia and America — the heroine, after all, is an ex-KGB agent — the show seeks to interrogate our absolutist notions of right and wrong.

Though Nolfi began working on the series before Vladimir Putin’s incursions into Ukraine, the show taps into the realities of the so-called new Cold War, in which political and economic tensions between Russia and the U.S. have been rekindled. It also examines generational divides between people like Alex, who were impressionable children when 9/11 occurred, and his parents, for whom the Cold War is a defining memory.

But it also tries for a certain timelessness. In setting up competing agendas between mother and son, “Allegiance” looks at problems that bedevil even the most ordinary families, a shot of “Parenthood” amid the Robert Ludlum twists.