Sacha Baron Cohen may never give us another season of Who Is America?, his uneven but fitfully brilliant Showtime series where he proved he’s still the greatest troll alive by getting Dick Cheney to sign a waterboard kit, but it sounds like the guy is already heading back to TV this fall. On Wednesday, Netflix announced that The Spy, an upcoming limited series starring Cohen, will hit the streaming service on September 6—and even dropped some first-look photos from the show.
Don’t expect to more episodes of Cohen convincing Republican lawmakers to pull down their pants and scream slurs, though. The Spy is a scripted drama from Gideon Raff, the guy who created the Israeli drama that was adapted into Homeland, and it stars Cohen as, yes, you guessed it, a spy.
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Here’s the show’s synopsis, via Netflix:
THE SPY is inspired by the real-life story of former Mossad agent, Eli Cohen, who successfully goes undercover in Syria in the early 1960s. Cohen becomes close enough to ambitious military leaders and their rich friends to earn a game-changing level of trust about Syria’s biggest anti-Israel secret initiatives. The series stars, Emmy-nominated Sacha Baron Cohen (Who is America?) as Eli Cohen, a man who wants nothing more than to be of service to his country, but he does his job so well that he finds it hard to strip off his double identity.
A prestige-y period spy drama isn’t exactly the kind of show you’d expect from Cohen, but the guy is a pretty talented actor even when he isn’t messing with Sarah Palin or whatever he has some experience with playing ex-Mossad agents already, so we’ll take what we can get.
The Spy’s six hour-long episodes are all directed by Raff and co-written by Raff and Max Perry. Noah Emmerich, Hadar Ratzon Rotem, and Wales Zuaiter will fill out the cast alongside Cohen. The full season is set to drop on Netflix on September 6. Until then, stare longingly at Cohen’s mustache in the photos above and dream of the Queen biopic that never was.
