Amazon Wants to Make the Spy Genre Great Again. ‘Butterfly’ Proves It Can’t.

Amazon Prime came late to the streaming wars, but it had something Netflix didn’t: a trillion-dollar parent company willing to spend big. So its strategy has been to plant giant flags in recognizable genres. First came The Rings of Power, its Lord of the Rings prequel. Then it launched Citadel with a first season costing $300 million, and bought the James Bond rights for about a billion dollars. In both cases, Amazon bet that it could own an entire genre by sheer force of budget.

Amazon launched Citadel in 2023 as an expensive, Russo brothers–produced action series meant to anchor a globe-spanning franchise, complete with Italian and Indian spin-offs. It flopped. Still, the ambition lingered. Now we have Butterfly, a spy thriller set in South Korea starring Daniel Dae Kim and the Russo name still in the credits.

Officially, Butterfly isn’t part of the Citadel franchise. Unofficially, it might as well be given the global spy agency setup, the international intrigue, and the vague gestures at moral complexity. Plus, South Korea feels like the next logical stop on the Citadel world tour. Kim, an obvious choice for a Korean-set thriller from an American executive’s point of view, plays David, a former spy trying to reconnect with his estranged daughter Rebecca (Reina Hardesty). The Korean actors even poke fun at Kim’s Korean accent, as if to preempt criticism.

The show is loosely based on the 2015 graphic novel Butterfly by Marguerite Bennett and Arash Amel, though “loosely” is generous. The original was set in the U.S., had no Korean elements, and kept its premise simple: a young spy turns on her handlers with help from her absentee father. In the show, that premise is still there, but buried under geopolitical clutter and the same dull title. (“Butterfly” is supposedly a childhood game Rebecca played; it’s mentioned once and never again.) The result is a series indistinguishable from half a dozen other genre thrillers — except maybe for the locations.

Rebecca’s introduction sets the tone. She assassinates a Russian ambassador in Seoul, under orders from a private intelligence firm called Caddis, definitely not Citadel! In most spy stories, killing a Russian diplomat would read as patriotic. Here, though several episodes later, we learn he was “one of the good Russians,” which is why, with David’s help, the U.S. shuts Caddis down. The setup raises more questions than it answers. Why is the U.S. taking the lead on an extrajudicial killing on South Korean soil? And why is the show so unconcerned with making that logic coherent?

This is the central problem of the contemporary espionage action genre: Without the Cold War to define spy affiliations, there’s a moral chaos at the heart of global politics. Government intelligence agencies like Bond’s MI6 or Bourne’s CIA could at least claim patriotism. Private outfits like Citadel or Caddis can’t even manage that. The only reason anyone seems to work for them is money or, more cynically, the thrill of killing people.

David claims he left Caddis after a mission against “vicious terrorists,” implying that his new operation only targeted the bad guys. Rebecca, understandably, isn’t buying it. Her best scenes are with him, where her cutting remarks are mostly accurate — he was naïve about his work, and she paid the price. Outside those moments, her abrasiveness feels like bullying, particularly toward Oliver (Louis Landau), the hapless son of Caddis boss Juno (Piper Perabo). Oliver is the closest thing she has to a peer, yet her contempt is played for laughs that rarely land.

Juno herself faces a problem of definition. Is she a villain? A pragmatic businesswoman? Perabo plays her like someone managing a failing startup rather than a dangerous spy agency. Her two big plot moves — trying to kill David’s team and backing the poorer side in the Ukraine war — make little strategic sense. If that’s meant to signal moral ambiguity, it’s undercut by the fact that her organization seems incompetent in every direction.

The plotting is equally shaky. David reconnects with Rebecca by interrupting one of her missions and killing her colleagues. If he doesn’t realize Juno betrayed him, why provoke her? If he does, why approach his daughter like a hit man instead of a father? The series never resolves these contradictions because it can’t—this kind of moral quicksand is baked into the modern spy template. Real-world analogues like Blackwater or the Wagner Group inspire news stories about civilian massacres and corrupt contracts, not heroic mythmaking.

Nominally, South Korea should be honored to be the location of such a high profile project. But what Butterfly actually says about South Korea is that it’s a country so in thrall to American interests that they’re lucky our heroes only incapacitate their police officers instead of just murdering them outright.

Ultimately, Butterfly has no reason to exist beyond keeping Amazon’s half-dead spy ambitions on life support. The backdrop is exotic, the action perfunctory, the moral stakes non-existent. For all its gloss, it’s less an espionage thriller than a corporate placeholder: proof that you can’t buy your way into making a genre matter again.