The Netflix thriller starring Keira Knightley took inspiration from a unit of undercover police officers.

In the almost criminally enjoyable new Netflix series Black Doves, Keira Knightley and Ben Whishaw play a chic housewife and her gay best friend who just happen to be covert operatives. They straddle dual identities, as does the show, which can often juggle tones with the deftness of a circus performer. Black Doves is at once a complex espionage thriller, a cheekily humorous dark comedy, and when it needs to be, a dreary domestic drama. It soars on the strength of its two central performances, and writing that is both self-aware and endearingly sincere.

Knightley plays Helen Webb, who lives happily with her husband Wallace — the British defence secretary — and their two children in London. When the man that Helen had secretly been seeing on the side — “it was love,” she says — is murdered on the banks of the Thames one evening, she finds herself embroiled in a plot that involves international spy agencies and a global criminal syndicate. Helen isn’t exactly a stay-at-home mom; a decade ago, she was installed in the life of Wallace (Andrew Buchan) — then an up-and-coming politician — by a secret agency of mercenaries known as the Black Doves.

1 All that criminal underworld-building

Black Doves doesn’t avoid real-world politics entirely. Helen’s husband Wallace, whom she was ordered to seduce and then marry when she joined the Black Doves a decade ago, has risen in the British Conservative Party to the position of Defense secretary; all that time, Helen has been leaking information to Reed about the country’s relationships and negotiations with the Saudis, the Chinese, and other groups. A major plotline this season involves the murder of the Chinese ambassador to the U.K., the subsequent disappearance of his hard-partying daughter, and the assassinations of Jason and two of his friends, a series of crimes that some of Wallace’s colleagues are revealed to be involved in. But the primary focus is never really the jockeying between the British, Chinese, and Americans over who is at fault. It’s the underworld operators who are spying on those negotiations and figuring out how to use them for their benefit, and Black Doves resembles the composite worlds of John Wick and Guy Ritchie in how well it builds out its network of assassins, moles, and crime lords.

Knightley and Whishaw’s chemistry has a lot to do with this; in both their present-day and flashback scenes, they have a spiky, sarcastic, sweet bond that adds humor both to action sequences, like when Sam saves Helen’s life by shotgun-blasting a foe’s body all over hers, and quieter moments of contemplation. (Sam’s recurring “Darling, I will certainly endeavor to try” vow to Helen is a lovely running beat through the years of their friendship.) Most of the series’ professional relationships have this kind of lived-in texture, from Helen and Reed’s venomous friction to Sam and his assassin rival Williams (Ella Lily Hyland) listing people in their lives that the other has killed. These are killers with moral codes, but they’re also people with favorite holiday movies, business fronts, and inside jokes; Sam buying Helen’s kids toy guns for Christmas is a particularly inspired touch.

2 Ben Whishaw’s broken heart

Black Doves keeping its international politics surface-level allows it to go deep on its characters instead, and Whishaw grabs that opportunity to make Sam the series’ soul. Helen drives the season’s action by trying to trace down who killed Jason and why, but it’s Sam who personifies the cause and effect of all this. We see how being an assassin’s son inspired him to want to prove his worth to his father, how his first job calcified him, and how his genuine romance with the gentle artist Michael (Omari Douglas) is destroyed when it becomes violently clear that Sam isn’t an insurance agent after all, in a harrowing scene where we see Sam’s dreams of a normal future disintegrate in front of him.

Whishaw has always been quick to skip across the boundary from hangdog to mischievous, and his alternating consternated frowns and winsome half-smiles communicate how dangerous all of this is for Sam, for Helen, and for the people in their orbit, even when a job goes well or a grudge is laid aside. Not every story about spies needs a conscience, but if a character is going to absorb all this emotional toll and convey its accompanying loneliness, it doesn’t get much better than Whishaw’s performance of a man who is thoroughly exhausted by this profession and these people, but who also can’t figure out any other way to live.

3 Every single thing Sarah Lancashire does

Every spy piece needs a world-weary handler who simply cannot put up with their young charges anymore (think of Martindale in The Americans or Gary Oldman in Slow Horses). Lancashire exudes comfortable authority and increasing impatience in every scene as Reed, whether she’s sighing, “Oh, Christ” at Helen insisting she and Jason were in love or setting up one of her charges for a double-cross. Through it all, Reed is simply unflappable, and Lancashire never raises her voice, never seems to blink, and never has anything but perfectly straight posture. She’s an iron fist in a velvet glove and provides Black Doves with the ideal quiet-but-forceful authority figure for Helen and Sam to bounce off of.

4 Keira Knightley knife fight!

Some women have a favorite lipstick; Helen Webb has a favorite knife. As a wife and mother, Helen is warm, smiley, and comforting, always ready with a question about her husband Wallace’s day and another craft for her twin children to make. As an experienced Black Dove who’s infiltrated the heart of the government, she’s scathing, quick-witted, and vengeful, and her eagerness to get back into action makes her a great foil to the more wary Sam. It also makes her a great fighter, and Helen’s action scenes are some of the series’ most exciting: when she takes on two assassins in the premiere, slicing and whirling her way through their coordinated attack, or threatens one who breaks into her house with torture using kitchen accessories. (Her “I have a NutriBullet ” threat is so matter-of-fact, it’s frightening.)

The best of these scenes is in the penultimate episode, when she takes on her husband’s assistant who has been getting a little too flirty for Helen’s liking, and whom Helen correctly guesses is another Black Dove sent in by Reed. The jewelry-store duel is very Kill Bill, with the two women tossing out insults before attacking brutally and relentlessly: throwing each other around glass cases, using the shop’s offerings as weaponry, and avoiding the incapacitated store owner. But it’s the moment when we see Helen realize this murder ultimately isn’t worth her time that offers a fascinating glimpse into how her mind assesses risk and reward. When she calls Reed to tell her off for sending “a teenager to kill me,” Knightley’s amused irritation lets us know how unserious this fight was to her. You know she’s done a lot more damage with that knife.

5 There’s more to come!

Black Doves wraps its story up pretty effectively via a solidly twisty series of reveals that is mostly delivered via Reed’s exposition and a flashback montage, but it’s anchored by Knightley’s face, which flickers through shock, despair, fear, and finally wistfulness as she realizes who was responsible for killing Jason and how she got dragged into it. The plotting is neat, and the emotional arc works. But there are two other things that happen at the end of finale “In the Bleak Midwinter” that suggest major changes for the upcoming second season.

The first is that Sam, who had previously been a freelance assassin and then Helen’s partner, takes a job with someone he was supposed to assassinate years ago but couldn’t, a moment of hesitation that led to the end of Michael and Sam’s relationship and to that person becoming a major player in the London underworld. So why would Sam work for him? Is it to escape the Black Doves, or because he was sick of former boss Lenny holding that previous failure over his head? Regardless of motivation, Sam’s new job seemingly means he won’t be able to work for Reed or with Helen, which would be a major change for the second season, given how key their chemistry was to the first.

And then there’s the last shot of Reed, seen entertaining a young woman in her all-glass-windowed home (a spy has to see who is coming from all directions!) The two don’t speak, but the implication is that this is another Black Dove, one whose intrusion in the Webbs’ life Helen might not anticipate as easily as she did Wallace’s new assistant. What other obstacles does Reed have up her sleeve for her onetime protégé? These are questions for Black Doves’s second season, which can’t come soon enough.

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