Work-life balance is enough to stop a hitman (and viewers) cold

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This article was published 14/12/2024 (673 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Work-life balance is important, and pop culture is paying attention. In current shows and movies, we’re seeing characters struggle to meet the competing demands of paid work and domestic labour. We’re watching them do their jobs while also trying to be good partners and parents.

And that’s great. We need representations of the economic pressures of late capitalism — the erosion of lines between workplace and home that have people feeling like they’re always on-call; the precarious employment and poor social supports that leave working families juggling unpredictable shifts and child care.

Still, do we really need to worry about work-life balance issues when it comes to hired assassins and deep-cover spies?

Two recent streaming series, The Day of the Jackal (Paramount+) and Black Doves (Netflix), are asking us to do just that. Killers for hire, these series say, they’re just like us! They also have to rush home because their nanny called. They also have to deal with spouses complaining they’re not “emotionally present” because they’re thinking too much about work.

That’s just so relatable, these shows insist — you know, apart from the high body count and multimillion-dollar payouts. It’s the gig economy, am I right?

Some of us are old enough to remember when fictional contract killers were ice-cold psychopaths whose histories were opaque and whose relationships were purely transactional. These new-generation assassins and undercover agents aren’t just thinking about the eight-figure balances of their numbered Swiss bank accounts, though. They’re concerned about self-care. They’re prioritizing their emotional health, trying to figure out how to lead full and rounded lives while killing people for money.

Black Doves, to its credit, mostly plays this for comic contrast. Helen Webb (Keira Knightley) seems to be the perfect wife and mother, making a beautiful London home for her Tory cabinet minister husband and their sweet twins. In fact, she’s a deep-cover agent working for a secretive organization that steals information and sells it to the highest bidder.

This is dangerous work, which means Helen’s Christmas season is going to be busy and fraught. (Again, so relatable — moms know that holiday to-do list is endless.) There are lots of scenes of Helen sticking cloves into oranges and stirring Christmas puddings and crafting costumes for the children’s nativity play, while occasionally stepping out for covert operations that leave her covered in someone else’s brains.

Black Doves works best when viewing these juxtapositions as dark comedy. It feels strained, though, when it seriously questions whether happy and fulfilling personal relationships are possible when your professional life involves lying, violence and the possibility that torture-happy rivals will target your loved ones as retribution. The obvious answer here would seem to be no, but the show keeps asking.

This weird, unworkable self-seriousness dogs The Day of the Jackal, adapted from the 1971 Frederick Forsyth novel that was also made into a tense 1973 film (and a ’97 flick starring Bruce Willis that no one likes to talk about).

This 10-episode series stars Eddie Redmayne as an international assassin (code name Jackal) who’s first seen doing standard hitman-type things. He’s in Munich executing a precisely planned political killing and then coolly making his escape, slipping into anonymity as police cars rush toward the crime scene, sirens blaring.

He seems like a classic “lone gunman” — faceless, nameless, chilly. But when he heads to the Spanish countryside, we see he’s actually a family man with a young wife and a little boy.

Soon the Jackal is planning the tricky takeout of a tech billionaire at the same time he’s distracted by niggling domestic problems. He’s got a brother-in-law hitting him up for money. He’s got a mother-in-law who doesn’t approve of him — and whose desire to post pictures of her adorable grandson on Facebook could blow his cover. He’s got a wife who’s becoming increasingly suspicious about his long, unexplained absences.

The Jackal is also being tracked by Bianca (Lashana Lynch), an MI6 weapons expert. Pushing the “We’re not so different, you and I” tropes, the series keeps emphasizing the adversaries’ similarities, showing them both as driven, deceptive and ruthless. It also parallels their issues at home: We see both of them apologetically leaving big family dinners, missing important milestones in their children’s lives, smiling in a preoccupied way at their partners when they’re really brooding over work.

Showcasing all these family problems is clearly meant to humanize these characters, to make them feel relatable, to make them feel contemporary. But for viewers whose most pressing work-life balance issue is whether to take employer emails after 7 p.m., this connection might not register.

There are lots of genres where I want to see nuanced depictions of the tension between work and home. But I still prefer my triggermen and espionage agents to focus on the job at hand, particularly when the stakes are literally life and death. Cutting away from potentially lethal situations so characters can take calls about parent-teacher interviews doesn’t feel like human complexity to me. It feels like filler.

alison.gillmor@freepress.mb.ca