[Read Park Chan-wook’s take on his first TV show.]

It won’t please every Le Carré fan, and it doesn’t do justice — doesn’t try to do justice, really — to one important aspect of his story, regarding the emotional fallout for the civilian once she’s gone all the way into the spies’ world. Somewhat perversely, given its subject, it’s not an acting showcase — it’s bound together by Park’s style and technique, and no performer stands out like Diane Keaton did in Hill’s film (she was the only thing worth watching). But on its own terms, this “Little Drummer Girl” is a success.

The fulcrum of the story is Charlie (Florence Pugh), a young British actress with leftist leanings, who comes on the radar of the Israeli team when she attends a lecture given by a disguised Palestinian. She’s exactly what Kurtz is looking for: talented, attractive and passionate, with a free-floating anger at the world that can, with the necessary work, be pointed in the direction he needs.

The work, once Charlie has been lured in, falls to Gadi (Alexander Skarsgard), another Israeli agent. Charlie will need to pose as the lover of a terrorist she hasn’t met, and Gadi prepares her by playing the part of the Palestinian, teaching her what she needs to know and priming her emotionally to play her role. It’s a performance and, like any good performance, a seduction, and the degree to which it’s real is a question whose consequences keep playing out after Charlie has moved into the terrorists’ world.

A large part of the work of “The Little Drummer Girl” is stage management — coherently and entertainingly navigating a complicated narrative that involves Charlie and her handlers; the Israeli, German and British intelligence services that help and hinder them; and the Palestinians, who gain prominence in the later episodes when Charlie becomes fully embedded, training at a camp in Lebanon and inching closer to the terrorist leader Kurtz and Gadi are pursuing.

Park does right by the suspense components. We always know where we are and (to the extent we’re supposed to) what’s happening, and in his first episodic TV project (working with the writers Michael Lesslie and Claire Wilson, and Mr. Le Carré’s sons Simon and Stephen Cornwell as executive producers), he shapes the material well over the six hours, avoiding dead spots.