In my view Tanner as a character in Eon’s films was never quite depicted as that ‘best friend of Bond in the service’. We first see him briefing Bond in M’s stead because Bernard Lee couldn’t take up his role again. So that friend Bond supposedly had came across as one of Whitehall’s stuffy bureaucrats and the part never quite recovered from that first impression.
Michael Kitchen shared a brief moment of camaraderie with Brosnan in GOLDENEYE. But this aside the role is entirely superfluous, perhaps also because it wasn’t vastly important in the books either.
Can be dropped without much impact.
Moneypenny went through a considerable expansion of her backstory, which also seems like reasonably good human resources policy: having a trained field agent as a last bulwark to the Head of Service, able to defend against intruders with force.
The more traditional parts of her duties, typing, organising M’s schedule and so on, all that could be outsourced to office software and devices. Who knows, in future films Moneypenny could be the name of a program.
Not a necessary character for a Bond film - unless they want to further pursue the MI road and counter with ‘team-007’ even more than they already did.
Problem with this approach is, it’s not actually good in operational terms.
Why?
Well, for one thing it’s bound to impair on attention and alertness of your agent if they constantly have their masters’ voices niggling in their ear with this and that while they try to wrestle with a guy one head taller than they are for a gun.
But the more important reason is Bond’s - or any 00’s - raison d’être itself: deniability. Agents are not fly-by-wire toys but expected to act independently, on their own discretion and judgement. And the Ms, Cs, Ministers/Secretaries of State/Interior/Defense/Defence are neither expected to direct them by joystick, nor is it desirable they do.
Also, their pay grade ordinarily is somewhat generous for them to spend their days playing Rogue Agent on a multi-billion encrypted real-time government satellite link. And we’re not even talking about boards of enquiry or memoirs yet, where temptations to tell-all (or more) might reveal unsavoury details the public usually prefers not to hear about.
Cinematically, that device is of course great to give desk jockey characters a part of the action, acting as trigger when they say ‘Take the bloody shot!’ A means to infuse drama and tension when an agent acts on direct orders and immediately is confronted with the consequences of their actions.
But all that isn’t really the core of the Bond theme. Which is that this character does the things a government - a sane government - doesn’t want to know about.
All my rambling above largely missing the point of the thread, of course.