Honey, Killing Eve Prequel, Gets Guardian Praise as Cold War Spy Comedy
Honey, a Killing Eve prequel set in 1980s East Berlin, stars Ann Skelly as a young spy and Rory Kinnear as her handler. A Guardian-style verdict: lots of visual gags and cold war kitsch, though the story settles into familiar comedy-thriller rhythms as the season goes on.
Honey, the Killing Eve prequel on BBC One and iPlayer, is a hugely entertaining slice of cold war spy comedy, according to a Guardian review published November 14, 2026. The reviewer calls it a visual delight packed with naughty jokes.
The series follows a young female spy in 1980s East Berlin. Ann Skelly plays the agent, known as Martha, and Rory Kinnear plays her British handler, Graham Anderson.
A sharp opening
The first episode drops straight into frosty paranoia. Anderson, posing as a British press attache, makes a tense crossing into East Berlin while hoping his car will not be searched.
A border guard eyeballs Anderson's wife, Anne (Sonita Henry), and shows off how closely the couple are watched. "Good luck for your smear test on Thursday, Mrs Anderson!" he says.
A car chase, a number plate swap and a sheepdog costume follow. Anderson smuggles Martha into the city at the height of its intelligence battles.
Honey traps and bugged rooms
The story then jumps two years to 1982. Martha is bored by low-level honey-trap work, posing as a hot-panted waitress in a dive bar. The routine is to lure men home and photograph them in their underpants to create compromising material.
The review praises the period detail: distressed browns, deep greens, knackered interiors and European pop needle drops. The short opening titles, set to music by the Inner Space, are called "deliriously hip".
One gag stands out. To beat the bugs in a debriefing room, Martha and Anderson blast a tape of sex noises rather than play music or run a tap.
Where it loses steam
Martha's boredom pushes her into an alliance with CIA agent Kurt Fischer (Nate Mann) and a dangerous entanglement with Stasi traitor-hunter Friedrich Baumann (Jannis Niewöhner). Martha and Kurt investigate a mysterious death that Baumann is also probing, without his knowledge.
As the season goes on, the reviewer says, Honey "settles down a bit too much into predictable comedy-thriller rhythms". Martha is also weakened, the review argues, by having to lust after both new men in her life.
The verdict is still warm. The show never fully delivers on its early promise to set fire to the spy-thriller genre, but it is "never less than very entertaining", with a visual gag, an eccentric supporting character or a striking knitted garment around every corner.
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