So, I started watching the first season of Spooks, the British spy show known over on this side of the pond as MI-5, on the recommendation of Steve Teles, a Johns Hopkins University professor with whom I argue about the bureaucracy, this weekend. And I have to say, at first I wasn't entirely impressed. The show has a lot of things I like about British dramas: a resistance to talking down to the audience, the fine collection of character actors, the settings drab enough to let the acting and the stories show and to look like London. But it also whipped through promising storylines, too, discarding a promising narrative about race riots in the UK that could have been drawn out over the course of an entire season like one of the arcs in The Wire. And the early episodes relied on some heavy stereotypes, like a fundamentalist American anti-abortion activist who wants to export her movement to the UK.
But all of a sudden, I hit play on the third episode, and Anthony Stewart Head is playing a rogue spy, and Hugh Laurie is swaggering along in his original accent and in an incredibly posh pinstripe suit as a rival agent from the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) who is dreadfully suspicious of said rogue spy. It's a great episode, even if it does end with a rather melodramatic hanging. And really, Head v. Laurie in any form, for any amount of screen time, would be utterly fascinating. So I'm going to stick with it. I need something to fill my time now that I've ripped through most of the John Le Carre Smiley stuff, and Matthew Macfayden's not bad to look at.