More TV!

The Game

This six-part espionage miniseries began on Wednesday on BBC America. It's a moody, stylish production set in 1972 England, then in the midst of a lengthy miners' strike that caused power outages even at MI-5 headquarters. A KGB officer named Arkady Malinov gets himself arrested for public drunkenness and assault on a police officer so he can tell MI-5 that he wants to defect and act as a double agent. Malinov claims he wants to act as a double agent so he can reveal to the British what he learns about the Soviet-planned Operation Glass.

What's Operation Glass? Well, Malinov doesn't really know, but he knows it's huge and will change forever the status of the Cold War. It involves agents the USSR has in the UK, and Malinov says he'll let MI-5 know who they are whenever he finds out. Although they feel sure Malinov isn't telling all he knows, MI-5's counterespionage team, which calls itself the Fray, gets to work.

The team is headed by the MI-5 chief, code-named Daddy, and played by that craggy-faced lion, Brian Cox. Daddy's second is Bobby Waterhouse, a snakelike conniver who lives with his mother, a woman who could give Angela Lansbury's character in The Manchurian Candidate a run for her money. Waterhouse's deputy is Sarah Montag, a sharp and ambitious analyst. Her husband, Alan, is socially awkward, but a whiz at the electronic eavesdropping side of the business. Secretary Wendy Straw is a young thing who doesn't have much to say so far. Seconded to the team from Special Branch is Detective Constable Jim Fenchurch, who thinks these MI-5 guys are much too full of themselves.

Our protagonist is the seventh member of the Fray, the young and beautiful Joe Lambe. You might remember him from PBS shows like the Silk miniseries and the recent remake of The Lady Vanishes. Joe is tormented by a failed mission in Poland, one that only Daddy knows the facts about. One of the things that Daddy knows is that a Soviet agent involved in that mission is in the UK, he's part of Operation Glass, and Joe's personal desire to kill this agent will be both a spur and a hazard.

From what I've read, it appears that each week of the series will focus on a new target revealed to the Fray by Malinov, whom the team will then try to use to find out more about Operation Glass. After just one episode, it's hard to tell how this series will shape up, but I'll definitely keep watching. It's got that moody look and music appropriate to Cold War espionage drama, and the actors are fun to watch. (Though I do wish they'd enunciate! It's a sad state of affairs when even British-trained actors mumble so much these days.) Each member of the Fray has his or her own secrets, there are tensions and conflicts between them, and their office-politics intrigues may turn out to be as much a focus of the series as Operation Glass.

The Game is on BBC America on Wednesday nights at 10:00pm Eastern time.

Death Comes to Pemberley

Did you watch the two-part Death Comes to Pemberley on Masterpiece Mystery? I did, and even though it doesn't seem quite right to say this about a Jane Austen-ish adaptation, I thought it was a hoot.

Of course, this is based on P. D. James's novel of the same name. James imagined Fitzwilliam Darcy and Elizabeth Bennet six years after their marriage at the end of Pride and Prejudice. They are now living happily at Pemberley with their young son, and busily planning their annual dinner and dance for hundreds.

The festivities have to be cancelled when Lydia, Elizabeth's flibbertigibbet of a younger sister comes careening up the drive in a coach and then bursts out of its door, screaming that her husband, the ne'er-do-well Wickham, has been killed. Well, more's the pity, it quickly turns out that it's Captain Denny who's been killed. But Wickham is arrested for the crime, and that's even better than his being the murder victim if you're a Wickham hater––as all right-thinking people are, of course.

James's book was controversial. The most ardent fans of Jane Austen and P. D. James seemed to dislike it. A lot of Austen devotées dislike the whole genre of novels featuring later or re-imagined lives of Austen characters, and they disliked this book on principle; some especially because it was a crime novel. Many P. D. James fans thought the plot wasn't up to James's usual standards. But I liked the book. It wasn't a case of Mr. Darcy suddenly becoming a detective. Instead, there is a judicial investigation, and Darcy is stuck with having to try to clear a man he heartily detests, since having his brother-in-law hanged as a murderer will be a stain on the Darcy name. Meanwhile, Elizabeth learns a few things here and there that seem to provide some clues as to what really happened to Captain Denny.

The dramatization accentuates the soap-opera potential of the P. D. James plot. A love triangle involving Darcy's sister Georgiana is raised in importance, while the strain that this affair––and, of course, the murder––puts on Elizabeth and Darcy threatens their love. There are emotional scenes––well, as emotional as you can get in the Austen-esque environment. Elizabeth can't help but feel that Darcy is regretting his association with her family, especially since he goes into full Darcy remote mode as the pressure of events ratchets up.

Lydia stays at Pemberley during all this, and she's every bit as much of a drama queen as you'd anticipate. The Bennets come to stay as well, and Mrs. Bennet is just as you'd expect. It only takes a visit from Lady Catherine (played by Penelope Keith, who you'll remember from the Britcoms The Good Life a/k/a Good Neighbors, and To the Manor Born) to make the whole thing seem more like farce than a murder mystery. And I'm not complaining; as I said, I thought it was a hoot.

The acting is standard excellent British costume drama style. I do have a quibble, though. Anna Maxwell Martin plays Elizabeth and, while she's a wonderful actor and I loved her in The Bletchley Circle, she's not right for Elizabeth. Martin just isn't vibrant enough to play that character. She does it as well as she possibly could, but I was aware the whole time that she didn't fit the part. Matthew Rhys as Darcy is an excellent casting choice. I became familiar with him as Philip on FX network's Cold War espionage drama, The Americans, and he has more than enough handsome, brooding intensity for Mr. Darcy.

Review of Broadchurch by Erin Kelly

Broadchurch by Erin Kelly, based on the story by series creator Chris Chibnall

Back a couple of years ago, I read about a psychology study claiming that people who had been "spoiled"––meaning that they'd learned major plot points in advance––actually enjoyed a book or movie more than those who hadn't. I think that knowing a story in advance can add another layer to the experience; if you know what's going to happen, you may have a more nuanced experience when you see a movie or read a book.

That's why I was interested in reading Broadchurch (Minotaur Books, September 2, 2014), even though I'd watched the Broadchurch series already, on BBC America. (I wrote about the series at length here.) I had David Tennant, Olivia Coleman and Jodie Whittaker in my head whenever Alec Hardy, Ellie Miller and Beth Latimer appeared in the book, and that brought them even more vividly to life. And the novelization allows the reader to know the characters' thoughts (to some extent) and provides a closer look at why some characters do what they do.

West Bay beach, Dorset, filming scene for the Broadchurch series

Author Erin Kelly has written five novels, psychological thrillers, including the recent The Burning Air (see review here) and The Ties that Bind. She has a lean writing style, but with a richness and skill at conveying emotions that works very well in adapting the story written for the screen by Chris Chibnall. The murder of 11-year-old Danny Latimer in the small Dorset beach town of Broadchurch makes friends and neighbors begin suspecting each other and questioning whether they could have prevented Danny's death. This is an excellent setup for the kind of psychological drama that is Kelly's specialty.

Chloe, Mark and Beth Latimer, grandmother Liz

Danny's murder is devastating to his young parents, Beth and Mark, who married when they were teenagers; his older sister, Chloe; and his grandmother. They don't know what to do with the rage that boils inside them, the grief that follows them from room to room and crowds them when they sit on the sofa. Beth, an avid runner, particularly feels the claustrophobia of feeling penned inside the house, but when she rushes to the grocery story to escape, the reactions of the other shoppers make her want to run them down with her cart.

Mark has a secret about where he was when Danny was killed, and the way life works in a small town, he hangs onto it even when it means he falls under suspicion, not just from the police, but even Beth.

DI Alec Hardy (David Tennant), DS Ellie Miller (Olivia Coleman)

And there is more drama with the investigators and journalists. Detective Sergeant Ellie Miller is not only longtime friends with the Latimers, with her son having been best friends with Danny, but Ellie is forced to partner with new-to-town Detective Inspector Alec Hardy, who has been slotted into the job that she'd been assured was going to be given to her. Alec Hardy is terse, seems to think everybody in Broadchurch is an idiot, and is battling personal demons. Hardy and Miller begin as nothing but rough edges to each other, but the friction begins to rub away the edges as they desperately work to keep the investigation on track, despite an increasingly fractious local population and the jackals of the press.

Maggie, Olly and Karen

Olly Stevens, Ellie's young nephew, is a fledgling journalist with the local paper, run by the tough-but-tender veteran, Maggie. Olly hopes to break into the big time, like Karen White, a brash reporter for a big national daily paper, who finds it difficult to reconcile the demands of her editor for tabloid-style stories with the sympathies she increasingly has for the Broadchurch locals. Karen knows Hardy from an earlier case in another town, and they are bitterly at odds.

Along with being an excellent psychological thriller and whodunnit, the story is a rich portrait of small-town life in this beach community on the Dorset coast. You don't often come across crime fiction that takes so seriously the effect of murder on a community. The story races along, with plenty of action, tension and emotion. If you prefer fairly short books, don't be put off by the book's 433 pages. It's a fast read, both because of its pace and the fairly large type.

Anna Gunn will play Ellie Miller in Gracepoint

You might have heard that Fox will be broadcasting a 10-part remake of Broadchurch, called Gracepoint, starting October 2. Despite what I said earlier about having no problem watching/reading after being spoiled, I'm not so sure about Gracepoint. I just watched all the videos on Fox's site and it looks like a pale imitation of Broadchurch. So many scenes have almost exactly the same direction and dialog, but the actors (except for David Tennant, who reprises his role––I guess he's that anxious to become better known in the US) have that buffed and homogenized look that American producers think we want, rather than the very real-looking actors that the British readily cast. From the videos, it appears that looks have been elevated over acting skills, compared to the British cast, at least in some cases. (I'm not talking about Anna Gunn's acting, but just look at some of the other actors' videos.)

I would strongly recommend watching Broadchurch (available on Amazon Instant Video and Netflix)––and reading this book––and then deciding whether you want to see Gracepoint. And look for the second season of Broadchurch, which is being filmed now in the UK and will air on BBC America sometime early in 2015.

Note: Thanks to the publisher for providing a copy of the book for review. Versions of this review may appear on Amazon, Goodreads, BookLikes and other reviewing sites under my usernames there.

Book Review of Rebecca Eaton's Making Masterpiece

Making Masterpiece: 25 Years Behind the Scenes at Masterpiece Theatre and Mystery! on PBS by Rebecca Eaton

Whenever I pick up a history, memoir or biography, the first thing I do is look at the pictures. Naturally, that's what I did when I got home from the library with Making Masterpiece. I was puzzled, because the first photos in the book are of the author as a young girl. I thought this was a book about producing PBS's Masterpiece Theatre and Mystery! series, not about the author's life. It turns out that it's both and it also turns out that's mostly a good thing.

Eaton, born in 1947, was a Vassar student when a school apprenticeship program allowed her to intern at the BBC and get her introduction to media production. Returning home to Boston, she got a job at WGBH (jokingly referred to when I was growing up as God Bless Harvard), which we now know as one of PBS's flagship stations and original home to Julia Child's The French Chef and This Old House, among many others.

Who knew Julia Child had so much company on TV?

WGBH decided that what America needed on television was British costume dramas, and what the new Masterpiece Theatre program did, starting in 1971, was to import them from London. At first, these were almost entirely miniseries that had been produced by the BBC and shown in the UK. PBS producers would fly to London for long teas, dinners and meetings to see what might be available and make choices. As the years went by, PBS began to coproduce with their British counterparts, and not rely entirely on already-produced material.

Mrs. Bridges and Mr. Hudson in Upstairs Downstairs

Most of us remember the first huge hit on Masterpiece Theatre: Upstairs, Downstairs, from 1974, and the host who introduced each week's episode, that comforting combination of wise old uncle and Oxford don, Alistair Cooke. Do you remember also how the show was always sponsored by Mobil Oil? It turns out that PBS itself didn't fund the show at all; it was pretty much all Mobil. Back in the 1970s, and for the next 20 years, Big Oil thought it would be good image-burnishing to sponsor uplifting––but still popular––television.

Alistair Cooke hosting Masterpiece Theatre

When original Masterpiece Theatre executive producer Joan Wilson died, Rebecca Eaton stepped into her shoes, taking responsibility for both Masterpiece Theatre and Mystery!  It was a
daunting assignment for Eaton, who hadn't ever understood the appeal of mysteries, who had just discovered she and relatively new husband Paul were expecting a baby, and who felt she didn't have nearly enough experience to take over from Wilson.

Executive positions in television weren't all that common for women in the early 1970s, and starting the job when pregnant was a real anomaly––Eaton followed convention and didn't tell any of the BBC and other television contacts in England about her condition, even when morning sickness forced her to flee meetings abruptly.

Eaton is very frank about her failures, like having to be talked into Prime Suspect, with Helen Mirren, and turning down the Colin Firth Pride & Prejudice miniseries because Masterpiece Theatre had shown a version years earlier. She even discloses that she had a run-in with contacts at Mobil about editorial influence, and Mobil insisted that PBS fire her. She wasn't fired, but she was put on probation and told she very much needed to work on her people skills. I don't think I'd want to confess something like that, so I had to admire Eaton's openness.

Helen Mirren in Prime Suspect

Eaton is also open about the difficulty of balancing work and home life; the toll it took in missed time with her daughter, miscarriages, her marriage. Occasionally, it felt like too much personal information––but then that's better than those stories from certain celebrities and high-powered executive women who talk about how you can have it all, when you know they do it with a truckload of cash and a team of assistants at work and at home.

"But what about the shows and the actors?" I hear you wondering. The book doesn't disappoint there. Eaton breezily recounts story after story about Helen Mirren, Diana Rigg, Kenneth Branagh, Paul Newman, Robert Redford, Princess Margaret (a big fan of Inspector Morse), Daniel Radcliffe, and the entire Downton Abbey cast.

Eaton has such an enormous respect for British actors; their devotion to the work, flexibility and lack of star attitude. She tells a particularly memorable story about Diana Rigg soldiering on without a word of complaint, though her husband had only just deserted her, at age 52 and with a 12-year-old daughter at home, for 20-something Joely Richardson. (Man, that British actor community is a small world! That 12-year-old daughter, Rachael Stirling, is now an actress who was recently featured in The Bletchley Circle––which was shown on PBS, by the way. And Joely Richardson, daughter of the famed Vanessa Redgrave, went on to marry producer Tim Bevan (Love, Actually), who dumped her for a younger woman. Their daughter, Daisy Bevan, is––not surprisingly––also an actress.)

Diana Rigg hosting Mystery!

Once cable TV came on the scene, soon after Eaton became executive producer, the mission of Masterpiece Theatre and Mystery! became much more challenging. Mobil felt it less and less necessary to spend millions as patrons of the arts and PBS didn't increase funding. After Eaton foolishly passed on the Pride & Prejudice miniseries, Arts & Entertainment snapped it up. (That was back when the "Arts" in that station's title actually meant something.) HBO, Showtime and other far better-funded outlets began to compete with PBS for British product.

Martin Freeman and Benedict Cumberbatch in Sherlock

And now, in the era of hundreds of TV stations, live streaming video, and so much competition for the consumer's entertainment dollars, Rebecca Eaton keeps on trying to find those dramas and mysteries that will keep viewers tuning in week after week. She's done a good job in recent years, what with Cranford, Inspector Lewis, Sherlock and the blockbuster Downton Abbey (not a favorite of mine, but there's no denying it's a phenomenal success in the US), and her obvious love of her job and dedication to the mission of bringing excellent programming to PBS promise more to come.

While it wasn't quite what I expected, Making Masterpiece ends up being a fascinating story of how Masterpiece (with what is now called three subdivisions: Classic, Contemporary and Mystery) is produced, filled with yummy gossipy bits about actors we're all familiar with, and a clear-eyed confession of the personal costs to a woman of having a demanding job over the last quarter century.

Making it a personal story illustrates how a little jog here and a bit of happenstance there can push a life in an unexpected direction, especially the discovery of a career that could never have been a dream job because it's a job you didn't even know existed. So even though I hadn't expected so much of Rebecca Eaton's own life to be represented in the book, it added a lot of texture and insight and made the book that much more interesting to read.

Laurence Fox,
the next Lord Peter?

Now that I feel I've gotten to know Rebecca Eaton––and that she's learned her lesson about foolishly turning down remakes––maybe I can persuade her to mount a new production of the Lord Peter Wimsey mysteries, casting Laurence Fox (Hathaway in Inspector Lewis) as Lord Peter.

Note: Versions of this review may appear on Amazon, goodreads and other review sites under my usernames there.

Summertime Crime

Are you ready for some TV crime? Most people watch a lot less TV in the summer, but I (for one) like to watch something in the evening after a hard day of yard work or even just lazing around outside. Unfortunately, the pickings are slim this time of year. There are two British crime series now available, though, that might just fit the bill.

For some people, all you need to know about Broadchurch, on BBC America, is that it stars David Tennant. Scottish actor Tennant is best known as the tenth Doctor Who, and for his critically-acclaimed turn as Hamlet for the Royal Shakespeare Company's 2008 season.

David Tennant as DI Alec Hardy and Olivia Colman as DS Ellie Miller

In Broadchurch's eight-part miniseries, Tennant plays Detective Inspector Alec Hardy, who is new to the beautiful coastal town of Broadchurch. Hardy's start is rocky, because he's partnered with Detective Sergeant Ellie Miller, who had every reason to think she was going to win promotion to the DI job.

Their partnership begins with a sensational and tragic case. A boy named Danny Latimer is found dead on the beach, a murder victim. What could have made Danny leave his home in the middle of the night? What could possibly have led to the killing of an 11-year-old boy? What is his best friend hiding? For that matter, what is his father hiding? The anticipation in the UK about the answers to these questions reached "Who shot J.R." proportions earlier this year. (Yes, that means a little Googling will reveal all, but you wouldn't want to spoil this for yourself, would you?)

This description of the show's premise might make it sound a lot like The Killing, but there is one immediately apparent difference. While The Killing (the US version, that is) is set in a Seattle that seems to be in permanent dark and wet, Broadchurch is often ridiculously sunny.

Still, like The Killing, Broadchurch's agenda reaches a lot further than the finding of a murderer. It's about the aftermath of the murder, its effect on the victim's family and friends, and the long-buried secrets that will be unearthed through the investigation.

Fox has already announced that it will produce an American adaptation of the story. Given the usual history of these efforts by network TV, I'll put my money on the original. You can watch it on Wednesday nights on BBC America. The first episode aired on August 7, but will be re-run several times, so you have plenty of time to catch it before the second episode comes along next week.

Did you know that actress Gillian Anderson of X-Files fame spent most of her early childhood in England? She was born in Chicago and, after 10 years in England with her family, completed her schooling in Michigan. She has an impressive ability to switch back and forth between American and English accents. This has come in handy in her acting roles, including her new five-part series, The Fall.

Jamie Dorman as Paul Spector

In The Fall, Anderson stars as Detective Superintendent Stella Gibson of London's Metropolitan Police. She has a particular expertise in psychology and is called in to assist with a string of unsolved killings in Belfast, Northern Ireland. The killer, who is known to the viewer from the start, targets young professional women.

The Fall was a ratings hit this spring in the UK, and a second series has been announced. It's not surprising it was picked up to be shown in the US, but the surprise is that it's not on Masterpiece Mystery or BBC America. Instead, the entire five-part series can be viewed in its entirety on Netflix's "Watch Instantly" streaming video service.

Gillian Anderson as DCI Stella Gibson and
Archie Panjabi as pathologist Paula Reed Smith

Making an entire series available at once seems to have worked well for Netflix with its recent production of House of Cards, starring Kevin Spacey. And it may well work here. I already know of a couple of people who sat down to check out the first episode and didn't quit watching until the end.

I am not a fan of serial killer stories, and especially not of stories about violence against women, but I'm hearing so many good things about Gillian Anderson in this role that I'll have to give it a try.