Photo: Channel 4
My esteemed colleague David T. Cole and I recently "flew to England" to watch Ambassadors, the latest collaboration between David Mitchell and Robert Webb of Peep Show and That Mitchell & Webb Look (sidebar: when did Netflix take down TM&WL and what the hell kind of horseshit is that?!). Ambassadors is an hour-long dramedy about a British ambassador (played by Mitchell) posted to a fictional central Asian dictatorship called Tazbekistan, and about the hassles his second-in-command (who's been at the embassy through several diplomats' tenures and who is played by Webb), his doctor wife, and his various staffers go through to represent British interests in a uniquely challenging country, by which of course I mean that some people rebel, some turn spy, and one of them accidentally kills a protected ibex. Normal stuff.
While Ambassadors has comic elements, it's not the riotous comedy Mitchell and Webb's past collaborations might lead you to expect. It is, however, a part of a proud British TV tradition: making art out of bureaucracy. We've seen it with comedies like The Thick Of It and 2012 (and, way before that, Yes, Minister and Yes, Prime Minister); we've seen it in schemey dramas like the original House Of Cards and State Of Play, and now, thanks to DirecTV's Audience Network, we get to sink our teeth into Secret State!
So far, we're only one episode into Secret State; if you have DirecTV, the second will air tonight (and if you "fly to England," you can probably find them all "on DVD"; the series's four episodes aired there in 2012). But here's what we know. Deputy PM Tom Dawkins (Gabriel Byrne!) has been dispatched to a very unfortunate part of the country called Scarrow, where an oil refinery belonging to a company called Petrofex has just exploded, catastrophically.
The people are pissed off that the actual PM has, instead of visiting them, gone straight to Petrofex HQ in Houston. One attendee at a public meeting (Gina McKee!) offers Tom a report: apparently, Petrofex knew about the issue and fixed it at another plant to solve it, but took no such measures in Scarrow. Poor, defeated Tom is on his way back to London when the PM (Tobias Menzies, a.k.a. Brutus from Rome!) calls from the plane, happily reporting that he's wrung all kinds of promises out of Petrofex. Unfortunately...the PM doesn't make it back to London, and Tom — surprise — is installed as his replacement.
There's not a whole lot else I can say about the episode without spoiling it, so I'll say that of the politically-themed British shows I've seen and enjoyed, Secret State bears the closest resemblance to State Of Play: there's a conspiracy; it may implicate people at the highest levels of government; existing surveillance machinery is integral to the plot; those at the helm of unethical businesses apparently have no compunction about murder; investigators on the good guys' side are also kind of slippery. The series premiere moves at a brisk pace befitting a show that's only four episodes long, and I'm going to take a WILD risk and predict that four episodes will be just the right amount and make us all wish, yet again, that American producers could be as economical in their storytelling.
Secret State is smart and fun and good and it's based on a novel called A Very British Coup. If that's not enough to convince you to watch it, then I SERIOUSLY give up.
Secret State airs Tuesdays at 10 PM ET/7 PM PT on DirecTV's Audience Network.