Smiley's People (Season 1)

"Smiley's People" (1982) is a six-part BBC spy serial you can watch online on iFILM — Alec Guinness back as George Smiley, closing out John le Carré's Karla trilogy. Smiley is retired and glad of it. No operations, no late-night calls from the Circus.

Then a former agent turns up dead. The Circus wants the whole thing quietly buried — too much internal politics, not enough appetite for old grievances. So Smiley starts pulling threads on his own. The trail runs from Paris to Hamburg through a network of Russian émigrés, and eventually back to a senior Soviet intelligence officer who hid something years ago, something still dangerous enough to kill over.

Director Simon Langton surrounds Guinness with Eileen Atkins, Michael Lonsdale and Curd Jürgens. The series moves at the pace of careful thinking rather than action, and it rewards the attention: Guinness conveys a whole inner life through posture and glance. Stream "Smiley's People" (1982) on iFILM.