The Hour: The British take on Mad Men

The the MI6 espionage subplot is a little hard to buy into and extremely hard to follow - as these things often are - even though you can follow and accept the action step by step along the way, they dissolve as soon as you examine the premises - would the Soviets go to such murderous lengths to recruit an agent within the BBC? could a fragile wisp of a TV reporter actually kill a murderous agent? - the BBC America miniseries "The Hour" was greatly entertaining, a sassy look behind the scenes at a BBC TV news-magazine show in 1956. As noted in earlier post, it's very much a British take on the Mad Men era, replete with the fashions, the sexism, the jazz score, the smoking, the drinking, the office sex - even some of the same tropes: good-looking protagonist (Domenic West, aka McNulty) addicted to serial infidelity, ambitious young guy and gal, each with parental complications, and so on. Part of the driving force of the series is the efforts of the crew to get around some weird British law that media could not (still cannot?) report on events under debate in Parliament - almost inconceivable in the U.S. Though there are lots of plot elements, twists, surprises, it's truly a character-driven series: West for one, and in particular the guy and gal, Whishaw playing driven, eager, idealistic, self-destructive young journalist and Garai playing driven TV producer fighting the sexist stereotypes but inadvertently playing into them by engaging in a very public affair with West. Whishaw and Garai are best friends - though it's obvious that he's in love with her and torn apart by her affair - but their coltish friendship is played very nicely, a kind of relationship we rarely see on TV outside of sitcoms. Not sure if this will lead to other seasons, but the characters are strong enough that they could have a life beyond The Hour - though maybe it's best to leave it at that.