Sleepers (Seasons 1–2)

Sleepers (Спящие, 2017) is a Russian political spy thriller you can watch online on iFILM, directed by Yuri Bykov and Sergei Arlanov. FSB Colonel Andrey Rodionov returns to Moscow after fifteen years running intelligence operations in Libya and Iraq — and the country he came home to has been thoroughly rearranged.

He's barely had time to adjust when he's handed an assignment: look into the apparent suicide of a senior Foreign Ministry official. The threads pull in every direction — a terrorist cell quietly being assembled somewhere outside the city, a foreign intelligence specialist who arrived in Moscow without explanation, a deadly incident involving Russian diplomats in Libya. Rodionov starts to see the pattern: not a string of coincidences but the successive moves of a long-prepared game. And some of the people around him have been part of it all along. Starring Igor Petrenko, Natalya Rogozhkina, Oleg Morozov, and Paulina Andreeva.

What separates Sleepers from the usual Russian thriller fare is the refusal to make the enemy obvious — the show is interested in what a sleeper actually looks like from the outside, and it turns out they look like everyone else. Stream Sleepers (2017) online on iFILM.