... or what passes for it around my house: the start of the fall TV season. The season premiere of Enterprise is this Wednesday ("How can we improve ratings? Better writing? No... Develop our own innovative style instead of retreading the past 20 years of the franchise? No... Let's make T'Pol sexier and more emotional! THAT's what fans want!"), followed by the soon-to-be-very-short-lived-I'm-sure new series Jake 2.0 (Hollywood premise #19c: guy gets injected by nanites, gains superpowers, becomes secret agent. Not to be confused with "guy gets mind transferred into genetically engineered body, gains superpowers, becomes secret agent" (Now and Again) or "guy gets implanted with Quicksilver gland, gains superpowers, becomes secret agent" (The Invisible Man) or, of course, "guy drives really cool car with superpowers, becomes secret agent" (Knight Rider)).
But the discovery of the summer for me has been MI-5. This British series, known overseas as Spooks, is just nifty. Spies are just so much cooler when they all have accents. And the spies in this show are real people with real foibles. One of them's embezzling from the agency. Another uses his clearance to boost his credit rating. And if you overlook the monumentally clumsy season 1 finale, the writing's solid. Unlike Alias (which I nevertheless adore), the hijinks here are firmly grounded in reality. These guys aren't superhuman and don't have future tech. There's not even enough budget to show normal explosions-- a car bomb explodes off-screen, merely implied by the noise and the ripple it causes in someone's lit match. And that's part of what makes this series work. Since they can't dazzle us with special effects, they have to make up for it in other areas-- the ones that really count. Plot. Character. Dialogue. Storytelling.
The show's first season was a scant 6 episodes, the second season only 10. With the rate at which they're being re-run on A&E, it's easy to get caught up. Or just jump in-- Tuesdays at 9PM.
Oh, and in case you're wondering: MI-5 handles domestic matters within the UK. MI-6, Bond's outfit, is international.
Posted by Peter at September 8, 2003 3:38 PMI'm glad someone's watching it - some sort of reassurance that our TV license fee dollars quid haven't been completely wasted... *sigh* :-/
Posted by: Chris M. Dickson on September 8, 2003 5:22 PMDoes this thing not like the strikethrough HTML tag, then?
Posted by: Chris M. Dickson on September 8, 2003 5:23 PMApparently not.
I take it the show didn't do well on its own side of the pond?
Perhaps everyone saw episode 6 first and was so appalled at its manipulations they never returned. I prefer to just pretend that episode never existed.
Posted by: Peter Sarrett on September 8, 2003 5:34 PM