For a spy thriller, Butterfly’s premise is a familiar one. A former intelligence officer comes out of hiding and goes against his former company? Been there. But the six-episode first season, created by Steph Cha and Ken Woodruff, also manages to be an engaging character and family drama, adding complicated family dynamics to these spies.
Led by veteran actor Daniel Dae Kim, the series follows David Jung (Kim), who comes out of hiding after nine years to save his daughter Rebecca (Reina Hardesty) from the clutches of Caddis, his former private intelligence company he co-founded. But Caddis hasn’t kidnapped Rebecca. She’s actually one of their best assets, a deadly and sociopathic spy unto herself. Another kicker? Her job is to kill David.
Their father-daughter reunion sets them off on a path of survival, revenge, and reconciliation. Turning a spy thriller into a family affair certainly makes it more engaging, but there’s also plenty of drama between David and June (Piper Perabo), the other co-founder and current director of Caddis.
A familial game of cat and mouse.
While a lot of the twists and turns throughout Butterfly are easy to see coming, the psychological cat and mouse game between David and June, with Rebecca and June’s son Oliver (Louis Landau) backing their respective parents, turns the back half of the show into a no holds barred showdown.
One of the weaker parts of Butterfly rests in the wider scope of the world building. Global ramifications complicate Caddis’ work as they try to cover up their involvement in various situations. It’s never super clear what Caddis’ original mission was, just that they are now selling info to the highest bidder without the U.S. government’s sign-off. It’s small potatoes in the grand scheme of the first season, but something that needs fleshing out in a future season.
But the heart of the show lies between David and Rebecca. Kim and Hardesty make a wonderful team. At times, the dialogue is clunky, but the performances sell it. Kim is a pro, adding layers to David’s stoic and heroic exterior. And Hardesty balances the wide range of emotions for Rebecca, the grief, hurt, anger, love, and fight she has in her all swirling around at the edges in every single frame.
Butterfly refuses to give any easy answers.
David and Rebecca reunite early in the season, but there’s no easy path to reconciliation here. They make a great spy team but their allegiances and loyalties are often tested. As spies, they each hold a different opinion on how Caddis is now run. Complicating things further is that Rebecca sees June as a sort of step mom, the person who was there for Rebecca after David supposedly died.
This tension between David and Rebecca works on multiple levels. The spy part, two colleagues in the same field, disagreeing about paths forward. On the other hand, it’s a metaphor for real-life parent-child relationships, and how often parents might not agree with their kids’ choices. Rebecca loves being a spy, David’s pessimistic about it. He also believes Rebecca was forced into her position, but she makes it clear time and again that she chose this life.
As the events unfold across the six-episode first season, the complicated family drama stays rooted as the main source of conflict, even up to the very end of the season, where it somehow gets even more complicated. Spy thrillers are a dime-a-dozen, but Butterfly manages to make a name for itself by centering a complicated family drama amongst heavy action sequences. Even if a lot of it rings familiar, it’s still an entertaining season of television.
Butterfly Season 1 drops on Prime Video on Wednesday, August 13.
Images courtesy of Prime Video
REVIEW RATING
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Butterfly - 8/10
8/10
Katey is co-founder and tv editor for InBetweenDrafts. She hosts the “House of the Dragon After Show” and “Between TV” podcasts and can be read in various other places like Inverse and Screen Speck. She wishes desperately the binge model of tv watching would die, but still gets mad when she runs out of episodes of tv to watch.
