“I don’t kill anyone who doesn’t deserve it,” says Sam (Ben Whishaw), the self-proclaimed “Triggerman” hitman in the new Netflix spy thriller Black pigeons. Sam, like the series’ other main character, Helen (not her real name, played by Keira Knightley), works for Black pigeons‘ eponymous organization. They’re more or less spies, but spies you can hire, and when you get right down to it, most of Sam’s appearances seem to be carrying out assassinations for drug dealers.

Sam isn’t the only hitman appearing in a stylish, starry TV thriller this winter. In Peacock, Eddie Redmayne plays Alex in a new adaptation of Frederick Forsyth’s 1971 novel The Day of the Jackal. Alex is a meticulous planner, a sniper with preternatural accuracy, and a master of disguise, but like Sam, he also wants to lead a relatively normal home life. His handsome fee has bought a cliff-side villa in Spain, where he houses his beautiful wife Nuria (Úrsula Corberó) and their doting young son, while entertaining their extended family on a terrace overlooking the Mediterranean. We know how it works: such idylls cannot last. It’s that tried-and-tested crime and spy novel: the intimate cost our hero pays for the work that gives us so much variety.

Assassins never completely go out of fashion in pop culture, but right now the fascination is so great that it seems to have spilled over into real life. The killer of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson may finally have been identified and arrested after sparking several days of debate over whether he was a professional. Experts have assured us that this was not the case, that the murder was too risky and audacious, and that he too carelessly allowed parts of his face to be captured by various surveillance cameras. Alex the Jackal would never do it! Many admirers were confident that no one would report the shooter, given the outbursts of anger against health insurers in general and UHC in particular that the murder triggered. The suspected murderer’s uncanny resemblance to the main characters in the entertainment shows Americans love to watch – as handsome as Glen Powell in Richard Linklater’s film killeralso released this year – might make some hesitant to drop the penny on it. How Black pigeons“Sam, the character that much of the public has built up in their imagination, is an avenger who killed another murderer, someone who deserved it, and that’s really all we want in a hero.”

Black pigeons plays such ironies for laughs. Knightley’s Helen is entrenched in the upper echelons of power as the wife of a Tory minister (Andrew Buchan) who everyone expects will soon move into No. 10 Downing Street. It’s one of the series’ many profound jokes that pretty much the only clean player in history is a conservative defense minister. Helen passes on the information she skillfully extracts from her husband to Reed, the leader of the Black Doves, played by the great Sarah Lancashire as a steely, dour headmistress who never raises her voice above a whisper. Like with Alex The Day of the Jackal, Helen’s children are a weak point. She had planned to elope with her lover (Andrew Koji), but taking her young twins with her poses a challenge. Then her lover is found dead, and Helen is only interested in revenge.

The role requires Knightley to transform in an instant from a relentless, grieving, blood-spattered nemesis to a smiling, charming political wife. This provides the actor with the foundation for the equivalent of a heavy metal guitar solo, and Knightley doesn’t disappoint. But part of the advantage here is how obvious it is Black pigeons compares the artificiality of upper-middle class femininity to the underhanded appearances of an undercover spy. Helen immediately recognizes that the flirting subordinate in her husband’s office is a plant just like her and also dangerous – although not nearly as dangerous as Helen.

Sam, for his part, longs for his ex Michael (Omari Douglas), the artist he was forced to leave when his work encroached on their cozy bohemian homeliness. Sam can often be found sipping soulful champagne at an upscale wine bar, resembling nothing more than an actor of modest reputation contemplating the havoc his peripatetic career has wreaked on his love life. He and Helen are close: each is the only person in the other’s life who really knows them. The emotional core of the series – the only thing that keeps it from tipping into complete darkness – is its friendship and the fierce loyalty it inspires.

Unlike Sam The Day of the JackalAlex is not a genius engineer of death; He goes to your house and shoots you with a silencer, and even though he’s pretty good at it, every now and then someone catches him. The humor in Black pigeons comes from how Sam and Helen integrate their work so smoothly into otherwise ordinary town personalities and how matter-of-factly they speak about killing people and the likelihood of being killed themselves. Sam has his code (he doesn’t murder children – presumably the adults he betrayed all had him in their sights), but beyond that the two seem to view their work as exempt from moral scrutiny. How many of the professional managers do the same thing? It’s not too far-fetched to see a parallel with Thompson, a wealthy husband and father whose company has reportedly cut costs by using AI models to deny care to his policyholders.

A fictional assassin like Eddie Redmayne’s Alex inspires our fantasies of mastery. He coolly and repeatedly accomplishes feats that others consider impossible. He has fantastic equipment and can escape from a chase through the city streets without breaking a sweat. The physical world, so stubborn and unpredictable to the rest of us, gracefully submits to his plans. Whatever trouble Alex has keeping his family together, he’s ruining it at work, and that includes anyone who gets in his way. He can exercise his will in areas where normal people feel powerless, which is what much of the public also seems to see in Thompson’s killer, a vengeance-seeker whose anger, in this particular case, coincides with their own, more impotent anger. We’ve spent years learning to be excited about his fictional counterparts. So it’s no surprise that to so many people he looks most like a… Hero.