The spy genre has never recovered from the end of the Cold War. Certainly the popularity of the genre never diminished, but the defining concepts remain so intrinsically tied to that particular geopolitical moment that it can't help but feel like it is floundering in a foundationally different world. Outside of The Prisoner the genre was never truly willing to engage with the dark, messed up things that happened in order to win the cold war, but the world of CIA torture rings is so wildly removed from what the genre does that it renders the stories archaic, almost quaint, reflective of a nostalgic sentimentality. Except for, oddly enough, the CW's Nikita which explodes with a degree of relevance wildly absent from its fellow stories.
The Cold War set up certain rules for how spies operate. Two global powers of roughly equal ability face each other with cutting edge equipment. Spycraft ultimately becomes a high stakes political game for strategic advantage. Of course the genre expanded beyond that paradigm (Ian Fleming famously created SPECTRE because he believed the Cold War was ending), but even against super villains the same rules applied. And those rules could never be adapted to a world where low-tech terrorism carried out by people who held no nationalistic ideologies became the entire focus of intelligence agencies. And that those intelligence agencies would brutally violate not merely human rights of suspects, but would attempt to spy on essentially all communication is far beyond the scope the genre was willing to engage in.
So the stories being told wound up repeatedly attempting to force the square peg of reality into the round hole of convention. .Homeland started out strong by examining the surveillance state, but quickly descended into magical terrorists and a version of Iran that was an even match for the CIA. James Bond fights against a North Korea with seemingly unlimited wealth and technology far beyond anyone else on the planet in Die Another Day. 24 became a jingoistic celebration of the worst abuses of the Bush administration, all while descending into ludicrous plotting. The Americans simply threw up its hands and set itself in the waning days of the Cold War (as did for comedic effect Archer).
And then there's Nikita. Ostensibly it is the story of a woman's mission of revenge against an organization, Division, that betrayed her. But really it is about the bureaucratic nature of the American intelligence agencies. It is less the story of Nikita, the rogue agent, and more the story of Division, the rogue agency.
From the outset Division is ruthless, cruel, and sort of pointless. Behind all of the rhetoric given by the first head of Division, Percy Rose, is the truth that there is no ultimate goal or purpose to the organization. It makes money for some people, but mostly it simply exists to perpetuate its own existence. This comes into even starker relief as Percy is removed and a lengthy series of factions takes over the organization. With each successive change in leadership it becomes more obvious that no on actually wishes to do anything with Division, they just wish to have it. Even more pointedly, each successive regime intends to reform the excesses of its predecessor, only to backslide into the exact same underhanded tactics. The show's central theme is bureaucratic inertia, and watching it elegantly unfold over several seasons.
And what Division does is primarily work for big business. Despite being a government agency, virtually all of the work Division does is in the service of the private sector. They take down environmentalist groups, trade adverse foreign leaders, scientists creating benevolent new technologies. The show posits that the government has come to serve the interests of major economic powers, not the actual citizens. It is a rather brilliant examination of what drove the CIA to overthrow the democratically elected government of Guatemala on behalf of a fruit company.
Division's primary adversaries are not, in fact, Nikita's team, but rather a Russian organization named Gogal. But unlike any reflexive attempt to retread the Cold War, there is no ideological difference between the two organizations. The difference is entirely economic, with Gogal serving a different set of corporations than Division. Capitalism won, and this is the ultimate aftermath, organizations brutally killing people on behalf of nothing more than profit margins.
One of the more interesting elements of the Senate torture report is the constant question of why the CIA would do what it did. Why would it continue to interrogate people it already determined had no information? Why would it continue to hold people it knew were innocent? Why was all of this necessary when it knew going into the war that conventional interrogation provided more reliable information? Nikita somehow conceived the answers to these questions prior to them even being asked. Once a policy has been implemented advancing the policy supersedes the goal of the policy. The desires of the rich and powerful are more important than all other considerations. Loyalty to an organization is the ultimate good (regardless of how that organization operates) and whistle blowing is intrinsically evil. Amazing how a silly little show on the CW manged to nimbly adapt a stagnant genre to the modern world.
