Entertaining show about the British security service MI-5 with a writing and editing style similar to '24', but typically with one or two episode story arcs instead of season long plots. The characters are well created and nicely fleshed out with skills and personal foibles, but do seem to have disturbingly short lifespans. Politics in the show are rather conservative at the beginning of the series (which started shortly after 9/11), but gradually begin to include a lot of lefty 'new world order' conspiracy stuff as the show progresses and the Iraq war became increasingly unpopular around the world. Like all shows of this type, it portrays England as having a shockingly high rate of terrorist attacks and far too many caches of surface to air missiles floating around inside it's borders.
While the action and spy craft is usually entertaining, it does tend towards the silly on many occasions. Weaker plots include elements like a small child with a laptop defeating the entire British intelligence computer network and the "G&J" algorithm (an extremely loose and poorly understood reference to RSA style encryption used on the Internet) security loophole that allows a villain to access any computer on the Internet, but who for some completely incomprehensible reason uses it to attempt to ransom the government instead of just tapping directly into banks to take the funds. Occasionally the logic is so tortured it becomes unintentionally funny, as in one season (spoiler alert) where a group of individuals attempt a coup of the British government. During the course of the coup they kill several people including an MI-5 officer, arrange to have hundreds of people killed in a staged terrorist attack, organize the slaughter of peaceful protesters by police forces, attempt the assassination of several high-ranking government officials and the Prime Ministers own son, and create detention camps where they round up political opponents and try to set them on fire. After the good guys finally stop the plot, one of the conspirators (that's right, just one) is brought to trial and convicted. The daughter and one-time co- conspirator of the convicted man, now amazingly added to the MI-5 payroll because she had an eleventh hour change of heart, has a heated exchange with her boss because her father received 20 years in prison and she felt he should only get 5. I laughed so hard I was crying. I don't know if this is a British thing I don't get, but over here we would say that mothf***er has got to go. Apparently in Britain trying to overthrow the government is seen as more of a stern talking-to kind of thing.
One quick not for those living in the states; it bears mentioning that the show has a strong anti-American sentiment that usually colors us as either arrogant jerks, soulless corporate overlords, or weapon merchants eager to sell biological weapons to foreign leaders for all their ethnic cleansing needs. Having seen other Canadian and British shows I've become de-sensitized to this so it didn't bother me overly much. I figure we made them the emperor's lackeys in Star Wars so turnabout is fair play.
All in all this is a decent bit of action-drama. When it works it works really well, which I'd say happens about 70% of the time. The other 30% fails pretty spectacularly, but still I would say overall it's worthy of providing a few hours of diversion.
While the action and spy craft is usually entertaining, it does tend towards the silly on many occasions. Weaker plots include elements like a small child with a laptop defeating the entire British intelligence computer network and the "G&J" algorithm (an extremely loose and poorly understood reference to RSA style encryption used on the Internet) security loophole that allows a villain to access any computer on the Internet, but who for some completely incomprehensible reason uses it to attempt to ransom the government instead of just tapping directly into banks to take the funds. Occasionally the logic is so tortured it becomes unintentionally funny, as in one season (spoiler alert) where a group of individuals attempt a coup of the British government. During the course of the coup they kill several people including an MI-5 officer, arrange to have hundreds of people killed in a staged terrorist attack, organize the slaughter of peaceful protesters by police forces, attempt the assassination of several high-ranking government officials and the Prime Ministers own son, and create detention camps where they round up political opponents and try to set them on fire. After the good guys finally stop the plot, one of the conspirators (that's right, just one) is brought to trial and convicted. The daughter and one-time co- conspirator of the convicted man, now amazingly added to the MI-5 payroll because she had an eleventh hour change of heart, has a heated exchange with her boss because her father received 20 years in prison and she felt he should only get 5. I laughed so hard I was crying. I don't know if this is a British thing I don't get, but over here we would say that mothf***er has got to go. Apparently in Britain trying to overthrow the government is seen as more of a stern talking-to kind of thing.
One quick not for those living in the states; it bears mentioning that the show has a strong anti-American sentiment that usually colors us as either arrogant jerks, soulless corporate overlords, or weapon merchants eager to sell biological weapons to foreign leaders for all their ethnic cleansing needs. Having seen other Canadian and British shows I've become de-sensitized to this so it didn't bother me overly much. I figure we made them the emperor's lackeys in Star Wars so turnabout is fair play.
All in all this is a decent bit of action-drama. When it works it works really well, which I'd say happens about 70% of the time. The other 30% fails pretty spectacularly, but still I would say overall it's worthy of providing a few hours of diversion.