There is indeed a spy in London Spy (BBC, DVD) but this BBC mini-series is not a traditional espionage drama.
Danny (Ben Whishaw) is a club-culture young gay man with a dreary day job who meets the closeted, emotionally suppressed Alex (Edward Holcroft), a genius with numbers but awkward with people. He’s an investment banker who works in a building with security beyond the usual banking standard, and when he suddenly disappears Danny discovers a hidden life: Alex was a spy and Danny is convinced his death was staged as an accident of extreme sexual misadventure to implicate him. Though Alex is dead before the first episode ends, his ghost hangs over the show as Danny tries to make sense of it all and his friend Scottie (Jim Broadbent), a former MI-6 agent who was drummed out of the agency when his homosexuality was discovered, vows to help him find the truth and try to protect him with the help of a trustworthy old friend and colleague (Harriet Walter).
The spycraft is all offscreen, seen only in its devastating effects on Danny’s life, and drama is about the heartless destruction of innocent lives to protect embarrassing truths from coming to light and the sacrifices that individuals make out of love. Charlotte Rampling plays Alex’s secretive mother and her searing performance makes an indelible impression even though she’s only in two episodes and Mark Gatiss, Clarke Peters, and James Fox make brief but memorable appearances. Five-part miniseries is written by Tom Rob Smith and directed by Jakob Verbruggen, which gives the production a consistency and unity. It’s a superior production, a compelling story, and a touching portrait of devotion and justice in a world short of both.
Five hour-long episodes on DVD, with a short promotional featurette.
Peaky Blinders: Series Two (BBC, Blu-ray, DVD) – Created and written by Oscar-nominated screenwriter Steven Knight, Peaky Blinders has been called Britain’s answer to Boardwalk Empire. Set in the North England industrial city of Birmingham in the years after World War I, the British gangster series (which shows exclusively on Netflix stateside) is smartly written, well produced, and delves into the political and social currents of the disenfranchised left behind after they sacrificed all for ideals abandoned by the ruling class after the end of the war. And it has the brutal edge of an American cable drama, which gives it a sensibility unseen in the more genteel British dramas.
Series Two jumps ahead a couple of years from the end of the first season. The Shelby crime family and their gang the Peaky Blinders (so named for their practice of keeping a razor in the brim of their caps) are trying to expand their power and influence. To that end, Thomas (Cillian Murphy), a war veteran who applies the lessons learned in battle to street warfare, picks sides in a gang war between the London-based Italian mob (led by Noah Taylor) and the Jewish gang (led by Oscar nominee Tom Hardy). Meanwhile Inspector Chester Campbell (Sam Neill), who has a personal vendetta against Thomas, is back to blackmail Thomas into being an assassin for the government, but he’s also a wounded man looking for payback. Charlotte Riley joins the cast as a society woman who trains a race horse for Thomas and become his new love interest. The revenge plot aside, this is the gang’s The Godfather moment as Thomas begins the process to take them into legitimate business.
The show has rich characters and features a vivid recreation of the era, while well-plotted scripts deliver some terrific gang war conflicts and robberies. And though set close to hundred years ago, the soundtrack is filled with hard-edged rock songs from The White Stripes, Nick Cave, and others (including a raw yet tender version of “Danny Boy” by Johnny Cash), and it’s unusually effective in setting the tone of the show.
6 episodes on DVD and Blu-ray with a featurette.
Grantchester: The Complete Second Season (PBS, Blu-ray, DVD) of the British crime drama based on the novels by James Runcie, about a young pastor who helps a veteran police detective solve murders in a rural town in the early 1950s, gets a little more personal.
The first episode begins with Sidney Chambers (James Norton) accused of seducing a teenage girl who has gone missing and is later found dead, and through the course of the season he is shunned by his parishioners for continuing to defend the young man who killed the girl (by accident, Sidney believes). The case sets Sidney, a man of the cloth determined to save the boy from a death sentence, against his friend Geordie Keating (Robson Green), an old school cop who isn’t above knocking suspects around. As tensions build between them, Geordie is accused of killing a suspect and even Sidney questions whether he’s guilty before uncovering the truth. On a lighter note, Geordie and his wife attempt to play matchmaker with a series of blind dates and Sidney ends up dating a flirtatious and funny receptionist at the station (Seline Hizli of Land Girls), but he’s still in love with Amanda (Morven Christie), who is in a miserable marriage to an abusive, neglectful husband. Even Leonard (Al Weaver), Sidney’s bookish assistant, gets to explore his own suppressed romantic feelings and he rises to the occasion when the local Bishop tries to enlist him in covering up the Church’s complicity in protecting a priest with a history of seducing teenage girls. It continues to explore adult issues and themes with intelligence and develop a rich cast of characters whose own stories take greater importance through the course of the season.
Six episodes on Blu-ray and DVD.
Detectorists: Series 2 (Acorn, DVD) – This little miracle of British comedy created by and starring Mackenzie Crook is the polar opposite of the original The Office, the show that launched Mackenzie
This little miracle of British comedy created by and starring Mackenzie Crook is the polar opposite of the original The Office, the sardonic comedy that launched Crook as the oblivious Gareth. Set in a club of metal detector enthusiasts in a small town in the English countryside, it stars Crook as Andy, a husband and new father with an archaeology degree but no prospects, and Toby Jones as he best friend Lance, who discovers that he is also a father when the daughter he never knew contacts him.
The six episodes of the second season are loosely built on the efforts of the Danebury Metal Detecting Club to help a young German man uncover a World War II plane wreck that his grandfather was on, though a little research finds rather suspicious inconsistencies in his story and his secretive meeting with a rival group (the competitive detectorists that they nickname Simon and Garfunkel). The first season won the BAFTA (Britain’s version of the Emmy) for Best Situation Comedy and the second season gives more space for the supporting cast to expand their characters and stories, from Andy’s schoolteacher wife (Rachael Stirling) yearning for a change to comic moments in the field with fellow detectorists. The dramatic developments are handled with a low-key manner and Crook, who writes and directs each episode, brings an affectionate generosity to the comedy, the characters and their interplay. It’s a lovely series with comedy rooted in the characters and presented with a genuine warmth rare in modern TV comedy.
Six regular episodes on DVD plus the “Christmas Special” in the bonus features section, along with a half-hour behind-the-scenes featurette that includes Crook’s BAFTA acceptance speech.
The Hollow Crown: The Wars of the Roses (Universal, Blu-ray, DVD) is handsome, ambitious, and frankly a little dull for all of it theatricality. At least until Benedict Cumberbatch makes his play for the crown as Richard III, the ruthless hunchback.
The follow-up to the 2012 BBC mini-series The Hollow Crown, which adapted four Shakespeare history plays—”King Richard II,” “King Henry IV, Part 1,” “King Henry IV, Part 2,” and “King Henry V”—to chart the succession of British kings over three decades, the 2016 production takes on three subsequent Shakespeare history plays: “Henry VI, Part1,” “Henry VI, Part 2,” and “Richard III.”
These are darker dramas than the earlier series, filled with betrayals and treachery and culminating in the murderous rise to power of Richard III, played as a borderline psychotic by Benedict Cumberbatch in a performance filled with twitchy asides and nervous tics. His flamboyance steals the show from the more conventional dramatics of the superb cast, which includes Judi Dench, Hugh Bonneville, Sally Hawkins, Adrian Dunbar, Sophie Okonedo (who is haunting as the mad deposed queen), and Keeley Hawes, and enlivens the final chapter from the somewhat plodding theatrics of the first two plays. Like the 2012 production, this six-hour production edits the plays down to play as a cycle charting the battle for the British throne and goes for a lavish feature film look rather than the stylized sets and stage-like confines of past TV Shakespeare productions, shooting in castles and courtyards and villages and staging the battles on fields filled with extras in armor. As any student of Shakespeare knows, the plays are filled with death and murder and the blood pours, pools, and spurts in this production, making it one of the most gruesome Shakespeare adaptations ever, though it is never gratuitous. Rather, it’s a portrait of British history as a violent, bloody struggle with little honor and lots of victims of the greed of monarchs.