I still can’t make up my mind about The Little Drummer Girl. In a few ways, I’m disappointed by it. But in others, I’m unsettled and intrigued—I can’t stop thinking about it, and this is a much better place to end up than the vast, empty chasms of pleasant indifference. I’m fascinated by its characters, and I appreciate how their life-or-death, espionage-y situations are representative analogues for the ordinary choices ordinary people face in our ordinary lives.

The six-episode adaptation of John Le Carré’s 1983 novel is the follow-up to AMC’s rousingly successful miniseries of Le Carré’s The Night Manager. But whereas The Night Manager was sleek and sexy, The Little Drummer Girl is brooding and austere. Director Park Chan-wook (Oldboy [the good one], The Handmaiden) wholly embraces a 1970s-era palette of rust oranges, chartreuse greens, and Argento lavenders, and while the results pop pleasingly from the TV screen, sometimes the visuals overshadow the story’s complex conduits.

This is a shame, because Le Carré’s book is fascinating and eternally deep—more than enough for six seasons of good material, let alone six episodes. (If you’ve never read anything by Le Carré, please put your computer, television, phone, and other assorted electrical devices into a dark closet and don’t take them out until you’ve remedied this.) The gist is that a secret agency of Israeli spies, led by Kurtz (Michael Shannon), are tracking down the ringleaders of a Palestinian gang of resistance fighters—terrorists, some would say, especially after the group bombs the home of the Israeli cultural attaché in Bonn, Germany. The Israelis recruit Charlie (Florence Pugh), a struggling British actress who’s exhibited signs of sympathy for the Palestinian cause, to play a crucial part in their efforts. Her handler is the mysterious Peter (or Jose, as Charlie calls him, although his real name turns out to be Gadi), played by a miscast Alexander Skarsgård, who’s too conspicuously Swedish to convincingly play an Israeli spy. Shannon, too, is distractingly strange here, burying his character under a thick accent and an array of different styles of glasses. The main problem is that Kurtz and Gadi both come off as far too sketchy for even the most desperate working actress to trust them.

Charlie does end up trusting them, though, at least enough to get involved in their circuitously complicated plan, which Park allows to unfold in a few unnecessarily confusing art-house gestures. Fortunately, Pugh is sensational as Charlie, offsetting the men’s disharmonious performances and centering the story on her character’s ambivalent emotions. It’s an incredibly precarious tightrope walk that Pugh more or less handles with ease.

And Le Carré’s brilliance—how he connects the ideas of espionage and theater, how he draws the story’s far-flung locations as both exotic and mundane, and how he depicts the ethically complicated conflict between Israel and Palestine—can’t help but shine through. Park even delivers a few dazzling sequences where the marriage between author and interpreter works splendidly. What’s lost is the three-dimensional richness of Le Carré’s characters, and their difficult-to-discern motivations are obfuscated in spy-movie tropes rather than in precisely charted human behavior, a web Le Carré recognizes is far more tangled than any international-thriller intricacies.

The perception that John Le Carré is merely a bestselling genre novelist is slowly unraveling—his work is finally being recognized for its literary depth and breathtakingly good prose. But in the end, The Little Drummer Girl suffers by trying to take on too much of Le Carré. There’s a lovely chassis in the book that could’ve stripped down to make a great, suspenseful miniseries that would've pleased Night Manager fans. But I think a lot of people will be offput by The Little Drummer Girl: It tries to take on too many of the book’s complexities, and the end result is flattened. Still, if that end result leads to curious viewers checking out Le Carré’s incredible books—I’m serious, put those screens in your closet—then The Little Drummer Girl has more than fulfilled its purpose.

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The Little Drummer Girl airs its first two episodes tonight (Mon Nov 19) on AMC, with two more episodes airing tomorrow (Tues Nov 20) and the final two on Wed Nov 21.