BBC's "The Hour": Fans of "The Wire" and "Luther" Get ITT

http://tv.nytimes.com/2011/08/17/ar...ic-west-review.html?smid=tw-nytimes&seid=auto

Americans are beginning to obsess about decline, but the British long ago turned brooding over fallen empire into an art form.


“The Hour,” a BBC America series starting on Wednesday, is among the best of the genre. It’s a six-part thriller that blends the Suez crisis, one of Britain’s sharpest intimations of loss, with a more intimate look at sex, ambition and espionage in the workplace.
Any period piece set in the 1950s is bound to look a lot like “Mad Men,” and this narrative also unfolds through an amber haze of cigarette smoke, whiskey and social taboos. Yet unlike the many sterile “Mad Men” knockoffs that American networks are bringing out in the fall, like “The Playboy Club” and “Pan Am,” this BBC series isn’t a pale imitation of anything else on television. “The Hour” does borrow from the movie “Broadcast News,” as well as the 2003 BBC mini-series “State of Play,” but with a style and intelligence all its own.
The series opens in the offices of the British Broadcasting Corporation in 1956, only five years after the first Cambridge spies were unmasked as double agents, and just as President Gamal Abdel Nasser is consolidating power in Egypt. It’s a time of unsettling change, except at the BBC, where even driven reporters are assigned to do feel-good newsreels about debutante balls and royal visits.
No one is more impatient with what he calls the “brisk banality” of television news than Freddie Lyon (Ben Whishaw), a brilliant, irascible and rebellious reporter. He grouses about the coverage, sneering, “Martial law may have been imposed in Poland, and we have footage of Prince Rainier on honeymoon with his showgirl.” (Some things never change.)
Bel Rowley (Romola Garai), a beautiful, well-educated producer, is Freddie’s best friend and protector. She’s one of very few women in so high a position. (He calls her Moneypenny, a reference to the secretary in James Bond novels that she only occasionally finds annoying.) Bel has a promising career and a stunted social life; she keeps having affairs with unavailable men.
When Bel and Freddie are assigned to help create a daring live news program called “The Hour,” their rapport is threatened by the arrival of Hector Madden (Dominic West), a handsome, brashly confident newcomer who, through family connections, gets the plum job of chief anchor of the show.
The three journalists quickly find themselves in a triangle, only there is more at stake in it than their feelings or even journalistic integrity. Their new venture is shadowed by the mysterious death of a young woman who happens to be Freddie’s childhood friend. The program also seems to attract slippery interference from the powers that be. And there are signs that British intelligence has a mole or two within its inner sanctum.
The more Freddie is advised not to pursue the circumstances of his friend’s death, the more he insists on investigating it on his own.
World War II ended a decade earlier, but there is nothing particularly triumphant about this Britain, which seems too exhausted by the past to lead the future effectively. Class privilege is still intact but is under assault from all sides. In the United States, President Dwight D. Eisenhower favors decolonization, while immigrants flooding into Britain from newly independent former colonies expect to be welcomed. A new generation of angry young men is emboldened to challenge the system, and so are some of the women who learned self-reliance when their men were fighting overseas.
Even the landscapes are shrinking. Seen from a distance, country estates owned by the rich and titled look majestic and almost magical; inside, the wallpaper looks dingy; the grandest halls, lined with portraits and suits of armor, seem claustrophobic.
Bel is respected by her colleagues and is only occasionally reminded that, as a woman, she is considered a second-class citizen, a reminder most often delivered by Angus McCain (Julian Rhind-Tutt), an upper-class snob who is a media adviser to the ailing prime minister, Anthony Eden. Angus openly snubs Bel, and she retaliates by asking after the prime minister’s health.
“Such maternal instincts,” Angus replies cattily. “I do think you are rather wasted in news.”
Mr. West, who played McNulty on “The Wire,” is almost unrecognizable here as a well-bred charmer whose ambition is flecked with self-awareness. Ms. Garai, who was the star of a 2010 production of “Emma” on PBS, is alluringly not conventionally pretty: Bel has a sense of humor and a grave demeanor, delicate features and a sexy figure verging on the Junoesque. Her healthy physique accentuates Freddie’s fragility.
Mr. Whishaw, who played Sebastian Flyte in the 2008 movie of “Brideshead Revisited,” has the unnourished body of a London youth reared on wartime rations. There is a sexual chemistry, but it’s a three-way street.
Engaging secondary characters bolster these three, particularly Lix Storm (Anna Chancellor), a former war correspondent in charge of foreign news who stays alert — and sardonic — on a prodigious and steady supply of cigarettes and whiskey.
“The Hour” is so good that it seems far too short, and that makes its six-episode arc just right: Some of the most promising series, like “Shitty AMC Show” on AMC, lose steam midway, slowing down too much ever to recover the initial exhilarating pace.
The plot twists of “The Hour” can at times be puzzling, but the series is never dull. If only there were a few more minutes in “The Hour.”

 

What's more is I just realized that I have BBC America on UVerse. And I waited to watch Luther online each week.

 

Currently acquiring State of Play.

I can't remember who it was that recommended Shadow Line but it was excellent, as well.

 

BTN? Fill me in.

 

Yeah, I was able to find the same episodes that chan referenced on some other sites, FWIW.

 

Watched the first one. Good stuff.

 

Yeah I watched the second one and it only ramped up the intensity on the plot. I'm enjoying it, so far.

 

OK so they're all available for download? This pleases me.

 

Just finished it last night. Really good stuff.

Every series I've watched on BBC has been excellent.

 

Got any suggestions as to where?

 

This show is fantastic.