Condor Review: The Smart CIA Thriller Nobody Could Find

Condor is what a good adaptation looks like and what bad distribution can do to it. Jason Smilovic's series takes Sydney Pollack's 1975 thriller Three Days of the Condor, itself from James Grady's novel, and expands the six days into ten episodes of surveillance-state paranoia, with Max Irons as Joe Turner, the CIA analyst who returns from lunch to find his office murdered. Season 1 holds 87% on Rotten Tomatoes, the supporting cast is a genuine embarrassment, and almost nobody watched it, because AT&T put it on the Audience Network, a channel only DIRECTV customers could receive. The show was canceled after two seasons.

Spoiler-free verdict: Worth finding, genuinely. Condor is smarter than its numbers suggest and the cast around Irons is the reason. The conspiracy plotting wobbles; the performances do not. Track it down on a streaming channel.

What Condor is about

Irons plays Turner, an algorithm writer for the CIA whose code the agency has been turning on American citizens, a detail that turns his own work into the murder weapon when the cover-up starts. The kill order takes out his entire analysis unit, and Turner runs, which updates the Pollack film's premise for the smartphone era: the watchers can now track a person through their own devices, and the enemy inside the agency has institutional cover.

The series ran ten episodes in 2018 on the Audience Network, then moved to Epix for a second season in 2020 that closed out in December 2021. It was canceled soon after, with the show's low-profile distribution widely cited as the cause.

Cast and performances

The ensemble is the standout. William Hurt plays CIA bigwig Bob Partridge, Mira Sorvino is his in-house rival Marty Frost, and Brendan Fraser delivers a genuinely unexpected turn as a contract killer, the kind of role that usually goes to scenery-chewing and instead gets played as a job. Leem Lubany, as the relentless assassin Gabrielle Joubert, got star-making notices from critics in 2018, and the Spy Write review of the series singled out how the show keeps shifting focus to give every supporting player their moment.

What works

The tradecraft and the update. IndieWire's Ben Travers called it a "smartly expanded adaptation" in his premiere review, and the expansion is the right one: the 1975 film's energy-crisis villains become a domestic-surveillance operation, and the low-tech cat-and-mouse becomes a high-tech one without losing the paranoia. The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette noted how the pace quickens after a slow pilot into "a taut, violent, compulsively watchable series for fans of 24-style thrillers." The action staging is also better than the budget should allow: the pilot's chase sequence plays like a mission from a bigger show.

What doesn't

The plotting stretches. The Los Angeles Times' Robert Lloyd put his finger on it: "As the plot lines stretch this way and that and back into the past, the main thread can get a little lost." NPR's John Powers was measured too, calling the show gripping but arguing it "lacks the cultural relevance of its forerunner," a fair hit since the Pollack film was arguing with 1975 America directly. Some villain dialogue lands blunt, and the romance beats are the weakest hour-for-hour material in the season.

What audiences say

Where people found Condor, they championed it. RT and Reddit viewer threads from the original run praise the cast and the pacing, with the recurring complaint being discovery rather than quality: viewers describe hunting the show down after DIRECTV exclusivity kept it invisible. Metacritic's user score sits at generally favorable from 51 ratings, and critic scores cluster from 60 to 70, which reads low against what the audience verdict describes. TMDB has it at 7.0 from 297 votes, checked October 24, 2026.

Where to watch Condor

In the US, Condor streams through fuboTV, Philo, and the MGM+ channels, including MGM Plus, the MGM+ Amazon Channel, and the MGM Plus Roku Premium Channel, with Spectrum On Demand as a cable option. Checked on October 24, 2026. Season data and the full episode record live at Condor streaming options and member reviews. If the surveillance-state angle is what pulls you in, The Americans plays the same paranoia over a much longer game.

Verdict

Is Condor worth watching? Yes, if you like the genre and can follow a plot that occasionally outruns itself. The show's ceiling is the Pollack film's ceiling: a clean premise, a hunted man, and an agency that closes ranks. Its floor is distribution nobody chose. Two seasons exist, the cast delivered, and the 87% first season deserves a bigger audience than the one it got.

Rating: 7.9/10 (IMDb 7.7/10, Rotten Tomatoes 87% for season 1, TMDB 7.0/10; evidence-weighted, checked October 24, 2026)