Meet Alan Partridge.
The greatest television chat show host of all time (if only in his own mind), Partridge is a megalomaniac who makes awful puns, has no rapport with guests and shows more regard for his own celebrity than that of anyone he’s interviewing. He’s Regis Philbin without the bland likability, Merv Griffin from hell. And with his out-of-touch, self-centered charms, he conquered Britain as the focal point of BBC Television’s “Knowing Me, Knowing You … With Alan Partridge” and “I’m Alan Partridge,” both available on DVD.
Partridge, played by the brilliant Steve Coogan, is a character in the same way Stephen Colbert is a character. Like the “Colbert Show” host, Partridge was born from a satirical news show, making his television debut on “The Daily Show”-esque “The Day Today” (a spinoff of the radio show “On the Hour”) as a sportscaster with little knowledge of his subject. Also like Colbert, Partridge is a caricature of a familiar TV type, whose cult of personality overshadows his subject matter. But while we laugh with Colbert (whose over-the-top tone is more of a wink and a nod, reminding us that the actor beneath the suit is also in on the joke) as he skewers his guests, we are meant to laugh at Partridge.
Artlessness is at the heart of the Partridge character, predating the hardcore cringe factor induced by Ricky Gervais’ David Brent on “The Office.” Still, even if you don’t sympathize with David Brent, you have to pity him, because he’s pathetic in the extreme. Partridge, on the other hand, is just an asshole: In the Christmas special “Knowing Me, Knowing Yule,” which originally aired on the BBC in 1995, Partridge admonishes a guest for chewing too loudly, saying, “I’m not being rude but you do sound like a pig.” In “I’m Alan Partridge,” a two-series sitcom follow-up to “Knowing Me, Knowing You” that aired in 1997 and 2002, he crashes a funeral to brown-nose his way back onto television — asking the distraught widow if she was close to the deceased, answering a cellphone call about acquiring stereo speakers — while wearing a Castrol GTX windbreaker.
Partridge sprang from the minds of Armando Ianucci, “Closer” playwright Patrick Marber and Coogan, who plays Partridge with such precision it’s difficult to remember that there is a movie star under the comb-over and official Alan Partridge Tie and Blazer Badge (which Partridge bestows upon many of his guests — including a corpse). Coogan — who starred in Michael Winterbottom’s “24 Hour Party People,” was seen by the masses in the Ben Stiller kiddie flick “Night at the Museum,” and will appear in the Sundance hit “Hamlet 2″ and Stiller’s “Tropic Thunder” this year — conveys Partridge’s awkwardness with sly facial expressions and sporadic slapstick.
“Knowing Me, Knowing You … With Alan Partridge,” which had a six-episode run in 1994, is named after a song about breaking up by Alan’s favorite band, ABBA. Partridge interviews/attacks various fictional celebrities — from a Barbra Streisand-type chanteuse who, before taking part in an ABBA medley duet, keeps referring to her host as “Alec,” to a restaurant critic Partridge accidentally shoots on live television. (Partridge immediately sends condolences to the man’s family, but needs a reminder of the deceased’s name.) The guests, played by Marber, David Schneider and the excellent Rebecca Front, leave the interview couch with the same contempt for Partridge as he has for them. Each episode includes what Partridge introduces as a new reoccurring feature, which is then never repeated — except for the segment “Knowing Me, Knowing You Another Alan Partridge” where Partridge interviews people who share his name.
The first episodes are more uncomfortable than funny — Coogan himself seems unsure of how to make Partridge worthy of a full half-hour. But as the series continues Coogan finds his footing by allowing Partridge to be physical and outlandish. In the sixth episode, Partridge takes part in a dance sequence with the Alan Partridge Playmates, outfitted in boxy green blazers and creepy plastic Alan Partridge masks. Partridge later tells us the masks were recently used in a “Point Break”-style bank robbery, before instructing us where we can buy our own (“The kids love ‘em”).
“Knowing Me, Knowing Yule,” packaged on DVD with “Knowing Me, Knowing You,” is particularly hilarious. Afraid that his chat show will not be renewed, Partridge interviews the chief commissioning editor of the BBC — Tony Hayers (played by Schneider), who returns in “I’m Alan Partridge” — as a means of not so subtly begging Hayers to re-sign it. Upon finding out that Hayers is Jewish, Partridge assures him that the whole crucifixion thing is water under the bridge.
“I’m Alan Partridge” ditches “Knowing Me’s” talk-show format for a more traditional sitcom feel. The series follows Partridge, who has lost his show and been kicked out of the house by his wife, as he takes up residence in a cheap hotel and holds down the 4-7 a.m. slot on Radio Norwich. Partridge’s post-fame life is amusingly mundane. Followed around by his doting, sour-faced assistant Lynn, he tries desperately to get back on TV, pitching shows like “Inner City Sumo” (“Very cheap to make, you could shoot it in a pub parking lot”), but spends most of his time harassing the staff of the hotel where he lives.
The sitcom format allows Coogan to expand Partridge into a multidimensional character. Because Partridge no longer has a stream of celebrities to torment — as he did on “Knowing Me, Knowing You” — he loses his bite; his rudeness becomes more a mark of how sad he is than of his own inflated sense of self-worth. And he becomes exponentially more awkward: Trying to be manly in front of potential beer-swilling employers, Partridge sees a beautiful woman walk by and says, “She was certainly first in the queue when God was handing out … chests, or mammary glands. Ooh! I’d love to have it off with her. Ooooh! Sex.” But in the process, he becomes the least bit sympathetic.
Come on, you have to pity a man who, in all earnestness, describes Wings as “the band the Beatles could have been.”
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Read more of Salon’s Re-Viewed, offering fresh look at great TV shows available on DVD.
“The Mod Squad” first aired in the fall of 1968, and you can bet your bippy that its executive producers, Aaron Spelling and Danny Thomas(!), were hoping to capture the youth market, to tap some element of counterculture hipness and turn it into advertising dollars. But watching the first half-season’s worth of “Mod Squad” episodes on DVD (the second half is also available), I was struck most not by the ridiculousness of some of the “mod” dialogue (though much of it is pretty silly) or by the Jimi Hendrix-lite neckerchiefs and flared pants worn by the guys (which don’t look all that strange today, at least if you live just a neighborhood or two away from Williamsburg, Brooklyn, as I do).
What struck me most is how good-natured and gentle-spirited the show is, and how it strives for at least some degree of open-mindedness, even though it made its debut at a time when the generation gap was at its widest. The three principals are Pete Cochran (Michael Cole), the rich kid who had to get away from his family; Julie Barnes (Peggy Lipton), the lithe, leggy blond with a troubled, and only vaguely outlined, past; and Linc Hayes (Clarence Williams III), an African-American from the inner city who knew only poverty and crime growing up.
These three have been saved from certain degeneracy by a tough cop with a softie’s heart, Captain Greer (Tige Andrews). After plucking them off the streets of L.A. for committing various crimes, Greer has made a deal with them: Instead of doing jail time, they can work on the right side of the law, infiltrating the world of the young, a world of discotheques, free love and LSD. The trio’s supposed goal is to solve crimes, of course, but they also feel a heavy responsibility to prevent all those kids out there from getting in trouble in the first place. They want to save the world, one hapless flower child at a time.
That’s not to say that nearly every episode doesn’t include an excuse to put Lipton’s Julie into some sort of skimpy outfit (one of the best being a striped kitty-cat suit, complete with pointed kitten ears, when she goes undercover at a nightclub). But even though the show’s sexual politics are predictably retrograde — Linc and Pete often have to show up, at the last possible minute, to rescue their colleague from some baddie who’s got his big paws all over her — the show at least reaches toward some sexually egalitarian ideal. When Captain Greer wants to send Julie out to snare a serial killer (his gimmick is to strangle women with brightly colored silk scarves), Linc and Pete protest — it’s painful for them to think of her being endangered. But Julie is too game to turn the assignment down, and although the two end up following her protectively, the idea is that the three of them all look after one another out of affection and duty. Gender is a factor in “Mod Squad,” but then, so are race and class. The show’s tagline may have been “One white, one black, one blonde,” but the point of the show, maybe all the more touching for being so obvious, is that these three young cops are striving to get past the stereotypes the “establishment” has saddled them with.
The dialogue is often endearingly absurd: “There’s no way to divide three and come up even,” Pete says, when Linc, facing a problem from his past, tries to shut his friends out. And the acting is sometimes, though not always, worse. Cole is the stiffest, un-grooviest of the three, although he’s also the one saddled with the silliest plot devices. As the former rich kid, he’s often called upon to encounter some troubled old flame who makes him all dewy-eyed (and who causes Julie, who obviously has the hots for him, to look on with mild but undisguised jealousy).
But Lipton — with that unreal head of hair, hanging about her shoulders like a sheet of silk — is such a low-key presence that her acting doesn’t come off as good or bad. She’s enjoyable to watch because her look so perfectly captures an era, and also reconnects some of us with nostalgic desire: In Middle America, circa 1968, there were lots of little girls who wanted to look like her, even though we knew we didn’t have a hope in hell. That didn’t mean our lives were ruined, or that we were doomed to face a lifetime of striving for unachievable goals (or at least just straight hair). Maybe what we were learning was that it’s no sin to appreciate beauty, and it’s natural to wish for a bit of it ourselves.
And Williams — who has gone on to have a busy career, most recently in an uncredited performance in Ridley Scott’s “American Gangster” — is generally terrific, even when he’s delivering all that corny, faux-hip dialogue. When Linc gives a stern talking-to to a young woman who’s headed for trouble, and later says to the others that he wishes someone had talked to him that way, Williams is so alive to the moment that he keeps the line from sounding like a cliché.
“The Mod Squad” may have been designed to cash in on the counterculture “trend.” But it really seems to have been based on a formula that had been around since the time of “Rebel Without a Cause”: The older generation — which, in the late 1960s, would have meant anyone over 30 — had to recognize that young people are people, too, with their own problems and concerns, and that if you just approach them with a little understanding and sympathy, you’ll learn that they’re not so bad after all. That message is the antithesis of Doc’s squaresville “You kids! You make the world dirty!” speech in “West Side Story.” The idea behind “The Mod Squad,” delivered clumsily but earnestly, is something else altogether: It wants to reassure us that the kids are all right.
Do you relish the taste of a Cornish pasty? Do you have a thing for vicars? Do you long for picnic lunches on the moors? Do you like mad old birds on bikes with training wheels? Did you spend years mourning the passing of “Absolutely Fabulous,” and have you ever briefly wished that that storied show about an excess of British femininity had included more scenes in which Patsy and Edina ride tractors?
If you answered “yes” to any of the above questions, please run — do not walk — to your local video establishment for the complete first season of “Clatterford,” which began airing as “Jam & Jerusalem” in England in the fall of 2006 and concluded its first season run on BBC America in April 2007. The show was created by and stars Jennifer Saunders and Dawn French, the lauded British sketch comedy act, who happen to be the team behind “Ab Fab.”
“Clatterford” centers on the Ladies Guild in Clatterford St. Mary, a rural village in England’s West Country. The guild is, naturally enough, populated by the looniest bunch of ladies that Merrie Olde England has to offer. The nut case brigade is led by Rosie, played by French, a Clatterford resident with a knee-slapping case of multiple personality syndrome that results in slapstick fights with her alter ego, Margaret. Then there’s Delilah, the ancient church organist with false teeth, played by an unrecognizable Joanna Lumley (that’s “Ab Fab’s” Patsy, to most of you).
The heroine of “Clatterford” is Sal (Sue Johnston), a nurse at the health center who has been a defiant Ladies Guild holdout until the death of her husband from a heart attack (from which she is unable to revive him, leading her best friend, Tip, to reassure her at the funeral: “He was already dead before you killed him.”) In an effort to escape the cloying company of the local Grief Group representative, Sal finally gives in and joins the guild, inspiring rebellion in the tea-cozy-knitting, slide-show-watching ranks.
Clatterford’s other standouts include Saunders’ Caroline, the dry (as only Jennifer Saunders could make her) mother of a rock star, who livens up village gossip by talking about weekends spent with Madonna and Guy Ritchie: Fun, she claims, “until Sting started playing the lute.” Then there’s Sal’s stoner, circus-performer daughter, Tash, who lights the church wall hanging on fire while juggling at her father’s funeral and attempts to ditch her preteen son with Sal so that she can travel the world and sleep in a yurt. Sal’s uptight son gives his fluid-phobic wife, Yasmin, his mother’s old job as local nurse.
It takes some time to warm up to “Clatterford,” especially for those whose ear for Britishisms — think, “Her mobility scooter was sideswiped by a lorry coming out of the Lamb & Flag” — may be out of tune. It’s also true that if you like your television characters glamorous, Clatterford is not the town for you. There is no attempt to pretty up anyone: The residents of Clatterford would not win a beauty contest in any village, or on any planet. But Saunders, French, Lumley, Johnston and their gang have so much affection for this motley group of women that it’s hard to resist their good, and deeply sodden, humor.
Watching the six episodes from the first season back to back is no hardship; like much of British television, they flow together seamlessly, appearing to have been conceived and executed in one well-thought-out batch, unlike many American series, in which quality and continuity can jump erratically within even a single season.
Sitting down for several hours in Clatterford does present one particularly grating problem: The show’s theme song, a folk version of the Kinks’ “Village Green Preservation Society,” sung by Kate Rusby, is a lovely touch but may never, ever leave your head.
If only real-life small towns were populated by this many wisecracking crazies we’d all decamp for the West Country immediately.
If you were among the few who caught any of “Profit” when it aired in 1996, either you remember it or you did your best to forget it, maybe popping a few aspirin at the time thinking you’d drifted out of some crazed fever dream.
More than a decade ago, before Tony Soprano, Dexter Morgan or Don Draper brought their dark thoughts and varying neuroses into our living rooms, we were used to protagonists who were straightforward and likable. TV was dominated by friendly little shows with big yuks like “Seinfeld” and “Friends” … and “Suddenly Susan,” “Home Improvement,” “Caroline and the City” and “Boston Common,” all of which cracked the Top 10. It seemed a more cheerful time. Why would anyone want to watch a pitch-black series with a psychopathic corporate shark as its subject?
Because it was subversively riveting, superbly cast and directed, and unlike anything we really had seen before. None of the edgy drama success stories preceding it — the spooky surrealism of “Twin Peaks” or paranoia of “The X-Files” — prepared us for Jim Profit, a criminal mastermind who kills his father, sleeps with his stepmother and spends his days calmly manipulating co-workers into doing the unthinkable before retreating to his icily chic apartment, stripping naked and curling up in a cardboard box for the night.
Sadly, “Profit” bombed, and Fox yanked it after just four episodes. What might have turned off viewers to “Profit” wasn’t just that it was so different from TV but that it was such an affront to it. The show now looks like one long perversion of the cheerfully bland surfaces of ’90s culture, a sustained attack on the era’s prevailing power beige — the dominant blond-wood interiors, the boxy computer terminals, the toned-down power suits in earthy neutrals and the people. Boy, were the people beige.
But not Jim Profit. Profit (played by Adrian Pasdar, now best known as Nathan Petrelli on “Heroes”) oozes into Gracen & Gracen, a blandly generic mega-corporation, and wastes no time blackmailing an assistant into being his henchwoman, setting up the company’s president for a major fall and ingratiating himself with the company’s ruling family. We learn that the cardboard box young Profit was reared in by his monstrous father was a Gracen & Gracen box, and that the corporate slogan is “The Family Company.” Is Profit, the survivor of the father of all broken homes, seeking some sort of large-scale psychic revenge — or a family? What’s driving Jim Profit to destroy so many lives?
Part of what makes him such a menacing figure is that we’re never quite clear about his motives, or even if there are any. Seeing inside the mind of a sociopath doesn’t offer too many answers, and David Greenwalt and John McNamara, the writing team behind the show, know better than to try and make us understand Profit’s menace; the fun is in watching him on the hunt, not trying to figure out why he does it.
Much of what makes Profit so successful, though, is Pasdar, who didn’t just play him as dark lord but looked the part, too. If anyone then had seen Pasdar in another role it was probably in Kathryn Bigelow’s cult hit “Near Dark,” where he was cast as a fledgling vampire, and you can see why. Handsome, and blessed with a deep, purring baritone that he used to narrate the beginning and end of every episode, Pasdar made a very unconventional leading man for TV. But with his black eyes and ghostly pallor, he conveyed an irresistible, sinister charisma.
He was matched by the great Lisa Zane as Joanne Meltzer, the G&G security chief, who is Profit’s chief foil. Profit and Meltzer seem to relate to each other instinctually — she senses immediately that something is off about Profit — and it helps that Zane, with her swarthy beauty and low growl, easily could be cast as Pasdar’s sister. These two decidedly nonbeige choices stand out from the rest of the cast (especially all those generic Gracens) like wolves at the Westminster Dog Show, and their scenes together are the most vivid in the series, including the time he threatens to muscle his way onto her houseboat and she levelly warns him: “Oh please, Jim, break down the door. Give me an excuse to blow your psychopathic head off.”
(That’s the series’ second most memorable line. The first comes when Profit is nearly assaulted in his office by a saucy redhead in a red dress — the fantastic Lisa Blount — who plants a huge kiss on him. His response: “Hi mom.” Or maybe it’s the time later in the series when, after Profit tells her that her pupils are dilated from using drugs, she lasciviously responds: “Along with the rest of me, Sugar.”)
Sadly, the show didn’t showcase the fiery Profit/Meltzer dynamic enough. In 1996, it was before the serial drama really took hold, and each episode seemed bound by the constraints of a more conventional episodic structure, with new characters and conflicts. Threads were picked up and abandoned. It’s the chief disappointment in watching the full eight episodes (including the two-hour pilot and four episodes that never aired) of “Profit
” on DVD; we don’t get a clear idea of whether there was a complete arc planned for Jim Profit or whether the creators even knew where his maniacal takeover of G&G was headed.
But it still makes for a great time. There’s a hilariously enjoyable retro flavor to it now, just a decade later. In trying to give “Profit” an authentic, high-tech sheen, there’s gadget porn galore: brick-size mobile phones, Indiglo watches, giant TV remotes that require two hands and other assorted gizmos that you will generally have no recollection of, or any idea of what they were supposed to do. The show also employed a motif of early “Myst”-era virtual-reality graphics to show Profit plotting against his enemies, which seem hopelessly amateurish now, clunky and unrealistic.
But they remain creepy. And you can’t help thinking that one of the show’s larger themes — a chameleon-like sociopath uses the new, magical computers to invade his unsuspecting victims’ privacy, and to exploit and degrade them — would’ve registered a lot stronger with audiences just a few years later. Heck, they might even register a lot stronger today.
As a kid, I probably learned as much about sex from “Love American Style” as from anywhere else. Although the hodgepodge comedy show originally aired on ABC from 1969 to 1974 — for a time alongside family-friendly fare like “The Partridge Family,” “The Brady Bunch” and “The Odd Couple” — that’s not where I discovered it. It was a syndicated daytime staple for years thereafter, and I can distinctly remember faking sick (sorry, Mom!) to stay home periodically from school to watch it along with the soap operas a friend’s baby sitter had turned me on to.
Tuning in to it — upstairs, in my parents’ bedroom, on our one color TV — always felt vaguely titillating, a bit naughty, and OK, maybe a little shameful, as if I were peeping into a forbidden window. Was I in elementary school? Junior high? I really can’t recall, but I do remember that zazz of excitement as the opening credits rolled: the fireworks, the groovy male and female voices commingling in song, the famous faces framed in hearts. Seventies sex was so darn cute!
Or was it? The recent release of the original series on DVD (“Season 1, Vol. 1″ came out last November; “Season 1, Vol. 2″ hits stores Tuesday) reveals a show that is at once more innocent and more pointed than memory conjures. Beneath the corny vignettes and the meandering, sitcom-y sketches that make up each hourlong episode lurk a few sharp observations about a culture and time in which gender stereotypes, institutions (like marriage), generational relationships and pretty much everything else were shifting dramatically. But even while all that was changing, the show seemed to say, love is a constant. Even as it winked at swingers and sex toys, “Love American Style” was as earnestly romantic as candlelight and Chianti.
Take, for instance, Season 1′s “Love and the Legal Agreement,” in which Bill Bixby and Connie Stevens play a couple whose marriage appears to be on the rocks: He’s suiting up and going off to his law firm each day, drinking too much at night, neglecting her, flirting with other women; she’s spending her days hanging around the house in bright-patterned muumuus, feeling unfulfilled, flirting with other men. They’re always fighting and so, naturally, decide to separate. Since neither wants to leave their lovely home, they agree to share it. But when push comes to shove — when each of them contemplates dating someone else, and worse, seeing their spouse date someone else — well, wouldn’t you know, they realize they’re really in love with each other after all. See? Even in this crazy age of divorce, love offers a heart-shaped lifesaver.
Or how about “Love and the Unlikely Couple,” in which a perfectly average-looking young man, Wally (Wes Stern), brings his bombshell fiancée, Bunny (Barbara Rhoades), home to meet his folks. His mother (Alice Ghostley), who before meeting the fiancée had been nervous about making a good impression, suddenly suspects that the young woman is after her son’s (nonexistent) money. All his googly-eyed father (Lou Jacobi) can mutter is, “The lucky bum.” But it turns out that, no, the lovely lady is loaded, too. So, asks the mother, what does this beauty see in her humble son? And for that matter, why is her son marrying this woman?
Wally: Why? Because I love her, that’s why. Mama, you always said that when I met the right girl, something would twang inside me. Well, didn’t you say that?
Mama: Yes.
Wally: Well, the minute I saw Bunny, I started twanging and I haven’t stopped yet.
Papa: Attaboy, ya lucky bum!
Bunny: And I’ve been pinging. All time I’m with Wally, I’m pinging away!
Mama: They’re in love! Can you believe it?
See? Even in these shallow, looks- and money-obsessed times, love turns out to be not only blind but independently wealthy and pinging away.
And then there’s “Love and the Pill,” in which Jane Wyatt and Bob Cummings play middle-aged parents who try to get their teenage daughter’s boyfriend to slip birth control pills into her drink each day, telling him they’re vitamins for a rare blood condition. Unfortunately for them, he’s seen birth control pills before — because his mother takes them — and is aghast. He and the couple’s daughter aren’t having sex, he tells them, indignantly. “Why not?” they ask, confused. “It’s just the way we happen to feel about it,” he says, quietly, yet resolutely, “that’s all.” See? Even in these free-lovin’ times, some young people still value love over sex — no matter what the oldsters think.
To be sure, the show is anything but subtle, and all these variations on pretty much the same theme may grate on anyone who isn’t willing to cut “Love American Style” a lot of slack for nostalgia’s sake. Also, there are some serious clunkers to be found among the assortment of mildly flawed gems: “Love and the Doorknob,” for instance, in which a man gets his mouth stuck on a doorknob on his wedding night (it’s not what you think, but it’s also not funny), and “Love and the Militant,” in which a guy tries to impress his crush by threatening to blow up her boss’s office, to name just two.
But the silly inter-sketch mini-vignettes, sending up the changing mores of the day, are still fun, even if they seem far cornier, more obvious and less edgy than they must have in their original incarnation. And the show’s rotating cast of actors — Flip Wilson! Larry Storch! Arte Johnson! Sid Caesar! Ozzie Nelson! Phyllis Diller! — are a pip, as is the parade of groovy period décor, minidresses, leisure suits and teased hairdos.
So while anyone who tunes in expecting to be titillated may be as disappointed as those sex-preoccupied parents in “Love and the Pill,” they may also find themselves just as pleasantly surprised. Because “Love American Style” evokes a time when sex seemed full of possibilities, gender roles seemed ripe for redefining, and making love seemed like a perfectly viable alternative to making war. And who couldn’t use a little dose of that?
The days of the great American newspaper drama appear to be gone for good. Perhaps it’s the public’s ambivalence about the media, so easy to malign for giving us the dirt we hate ourselves for loving. The noble, crusading reporters of “All the President’s Men” seem more than a generation away from us in terms of naiveté. (Today they’d just be accused of promoting a liberal agenda.) Besides, by now most people realize that the best journos don’t really prioritize “saving the children” or “making a difference” or whatever platitude we intone when genuflecting to the conventional virtues of the day. Real journalists just want to get at the truth, and the truth can be a very nasty thing indeed.
The newspaper reporters at the center of Paul Abbott’s tense, serpentine thriller, “State of Play” — originally broadcast as a six-part miniseries on BBC in 2003, and now out on DVD — are not especially nice people. They’re crafty and pushy, full of sneaky tricks like setting off a car alarm to flush out a source, or pretending to be a bike messenger to snag a handwriting sample. They lie to and flirt with and browbeat their sources, and when that fails to get results (which is often) they do something likely to shock their top-drawer American counterparts: hand over fat envelopes of cash. (Equally transgressive on this side of the pond is their propensity for secretly tape-recording just about every conversation they have.)
Still, they root out the truth, and when they’re hot on its trail, they get a certain wild light in their eyes that’s unmistakable. It’s the hot gleam of reportorial lust, an essential passion in any good journalist and an undersung but crucial resource in any free society. These reporters are played by some of the best British actors around, not just James McAvoy, in a supporting role ideally suited to his clammy schoolboy prettiness, but also a sublimely dissolute-looking Bill Nighy as the editor in chief of the Recorder, the series’ fictional broadsheet, the luminous Kelly Macdonald and, finally, John Simm (“Life on Mars”), all nervy, resentful intelligence as the story’s hero, Cal MacAffrey.
The story begins with two deaths in London: One is the seemingly drug-related shooting of a teenage boy and the other the apparent suicide of a young woman who worked as a researcher for up-and-coming Labor M.P. Stephen Collins (David Morrissey). Stephen breaks down during the otherwise routine news conference announcing Sonia Baker’s death, and the tabloids are all over him. He confesses to having had an adulterous affair with her, and turns to Cal, who was his campaign manager nine years earlier, seeking a more sympathetic outlet in the press.
Cal’s friendship with Stephen, though slightly cooled in recent years, complicates his job, and those complications multiply as it becomes clear that he has long been carrying a torch for Stephen’s wife, Anne (Polly Walker, familiar to followers of HBO’s “Rome” as Atia of the Julii). At different points, both members of the estranged couple seek refuge in his flat, and eventually his personal life is almost as big a mess as theirs.
Meanwhile, Cal and his colleagues discover records indicating that just before she went under a train in a Tube station, Sonia got a phone call from the dead boy, who may not have been a crackhead after all. Nighy’s character, Cameron Foster, assembles a team of reporters to chase down the story. McAvoy plays a late addition to the group, a freelancer who has been banished from the Recorder for personal reasons, but whose ingenious sleuthing finally wins him a spot on the assignment over Cameron’s objections.
The situation is an ethical morass for Cal, but the rest of the crew is hardly a standards handbook in action, either. They exercise an impressive moral creativity as they follow the trail leading back to the larger forces lying behind Sonia’s death. They deceive and dicker with the police, who are usually one step behind them, and mount an elaborate charade to fan the paranoia of a particularly reluctant source. You can see why the other characters often dislike them: They land on doorsteps and perch by parked cars like the proverbial birds of ill omen, undeniable signs that the shit has hit the fan.
One question leads to another: What was the real nature of Sonia’s relationship with Stephen Collins? What did the dead boy tell her that upset her so much, and why was the first person she called afterward a foppish management consultant instead of her lover or her best friend? You’ll have to watch closely and listen hard to catch all the intricacies of the plot (and turn on the subtitles if you have difficulty with some of the actors’ Northern and Scottish accents) — “State of Play” places as rigorous a demand on the viewer’s attention as “The Wire.”
Nighy’s Cameron Foster is the series’ crypto-hero, but it isn’t until the final episodes that genuine courage begins to break through his façade of jaded weariness. Until then, he has the funniest lines, sighing, “Hands up anyone who’s never screwed a source!” when he discovers how many of his employees have chased the story all the way to bed, and shooing a reporter out of his office with, “Why don’t you go and type something lovely?” Still, when the moment of truth arrives, he orders one of the most stirring stop-the-presses scenes I’ve ever seen.
“State of Play” ran on BBC America in 2004, but has only just become widely available to American audiences on disc. In the interim, the series became something of an object of fascination among American television creators for its expert blending of complex story with headlong velocity. (The first shot is of a pair of running feet, and things don’t slow down much from there.) A movie adaptation, with Russell Crowe and Helen Mirren in the Simm and Nighy roles, respectively, is currently in the works, but “State of Play” can only be diminished in the process. This is television at its best, taking full advantage of its length without introducing a speck of fat, unostentatiously blending traditional camera setups with jittery hand-held sequences to orchestrate the emotions of the viewer, and offering a vision of the truth as an endless unfolding of character and power, pursued by people who are no less precious for being deeply flawed.
