Hail, Britannia: BBC America rises to the occasion with The Hour

As noted in previous post, Americans are suckers for British accents and will cut most programs (or plays or movies) from the UK a lot of slack, mistaking those sophisticated (to us) accents for high class and high caliber; however, sometimes the Brits really do excel and high class and high caliber art - they often can turn a pretty ordinary genre premise into a rock solid entertainment - it comes, I think, from a long tradition of a love for language and an acceptance of witty and complex dialogue in art, and also from the great theatrical tradition - guessing that most British TV actors do come up from a school with a serious dramatic training (and maybe even RSC experience?), whereas American actors come from - who knows where? Advertising and modeling, mostly. Anyway, the BBC America import "The Hour" is a good example of material that could be too trite or too sensational but rises up at least one level and maybe more thanks to the always high British production values and to a really smart script - at least what I can hear of it. Compared with the other recent BBC America import, Luther, The Hour is clear as a bell - but the characters talk so fast and in such an odd melange of dialect that it's hard for an American ear to pick out all the words, let alone the nuances. That a quibble, however - the series, at least the first 3 (of 6) episodes, is really smart: a kind of Goodnight and Good Luck meets Mad Men: an homage to young and on the make urbanites in 1956 London (far less hip and prosperous than the NYC of Mad Men, however) in a group that's putting on a TV show, the eponymous Hour, that was ahead of its time and something like 60 Minutes. Show driven by the young writer - an amibitious guy who wants to focus on investigative reporting and gets drawn into a murderous conspiracy (a little too far over the top and improbable, but a lot of fun - made funnier by the fact that he's seen reading the newly published Casino Royale) and his producer and BFF, a very attractive and much more straitlaced young woman. Though we keep hoping for and wanting them to get together, they seem unable to do so - and eventually she falls for the handsome but vapid "star" of the show, known to us in the U.S. as McNulty (The Wire), and in a similar, louche part BTW. All aspects of the series are entirely entertaining and engrossing - the acting of course (mostly unfamiliar actors to Americans) and even the updated 1950s jazzy score, almost a riff on the Mad Men credit sequence.