Review: MI-5 Breaking new ground with old tools

When in 2002 BBC1 launched Spooks, from independent producer Kudos Film and Television, it must have been something of a courageous act. Spooks, retitled MI-5 in America, and starting this Tuesday on WGBH 44, follows the exploits of Britain's play-dirty domestic counter-espionage/terrorism force (FBI comparable), which is beset on all sides in the wake of 9/11. All the more remarkable, then, that in each of the first two episodes, the ultimate obstacle to justice is not the evildoers but the home office — the government, which values foreign-policy politics and relations with the CIA above enforcement. US suspense shows may adopt that angle today; they didn't so much in '02, when we needed it. For those terrorist-paranoid times, MI-5 probably seemed downright seditious.

In general, Brit crime dramas trump their US counterparts in everything from dialogue to casting to cinematography. When American screenwriters want to "humanize" (or, as per contract clause, "showcase") a regular character, they generally throw him or her into some ridiculous one-off spotlighted crisis. (Think George Eades buried alive in Quentin Tarantino's 2005 CSI two-parter.) In British scripts, the characters arrive rounded, stressed, and flawed, their job performances and team interactions inseparable from their personalities. (Think Trevor Eve's Peter Boyd or any character in the BBC's Waking the Dead.) Better literature makes better — not to mention more realistic — television.