The first episode of the new season of Hustle, the excellent British-American co-production about a group of confidence tricksters with interesting moral codes, premiered Wednesday night and was not quite as good as the previous seasons but was still much better than nearly everything else on TV.
The excellent AMC/BBC-TV series Hustle returns tonight at 10 EST. Tonight’s episode commences the fourth annual series of six episodes of the British-American co-production about a group of confidence tricksters with interesting moral codes.
The BBC’s new series Robin Hood, showing on BBC America on Saturday nights at 9 EDT, is all right, but it’s not even in the same universe of quality as the glorious 1938 Warner Bros. production The Adventures of Robin Hood, starring Errol Flynn, Olivia de Havilland, Basil Rathbone, Claude Rains, Alan Hale, Eugene Pallette, Melville Cooper, Una O’Connor, Patric Knowles, Ian Hunter, Herbert Mundin, Montagu Love, and the rest of that superb cast, directed by Michael Curtiz and William Keighly. In terms of sheer entertainment and the joy it brings, The Adventures of Robin Hood is one of the greatest motion pictures of all time. Few films in the years since it was made have reached this level of delight, and for a TV series to get even close is to ask far too much. But it’s not too much to ask it to get a good deal closer than the new BBC Robin Hood.
The UK version of 24 starts tonight in the United States, when BBC America will run the first installment of the three-part series of TV movies The State Within. The program, which premiered in the UK in the autumn of last year, uses the 24 technique of creating multiple plot twists by means of unpredictable multilevel conspiracies at the very top of the government. Judging from the character and plot descriptions on the BBC America site, the program seems likely to be a good deal to the left of 24 and to constitute a comprehensive catalog of suspense-drama cliches, but it might be some good dumb fun for a Saturday night. Here’s a description of the first episode: When a flight headed for the UK explodes during take off from a Washington DC airport, America believes it may be, once again, under attack. As the day progresses, mounting evidence suggests that it’s the work of a British suicide bomber. With political relations between the UK and the U.S. in jeopardy, the British Ambassador, Sir Mark Brydon (Jason Isaacs, Friends with Money, Brotherhood), maneuvers U.S. Secretary of Defense, Lynne Warner (Sharon Gless, Cagney and Lacey, Queer as Folk) into a public
The BBC TV program 11th Hour, currently being shown in the United States on Monday nights at 9-10:30 EST on BBC America, has an interestingly ambivalent attitude toward science. The four-episode series appeared in the UK early last year and is now in its first run in the United States, according to my calcuations. To be sure, the program is pro-science, but it’s not at all certain how we as a society ought to decide what is allowed and what isn’t. The protatonist’s investigation of "scientific disasters" suggests that there must be some limits, but what they are is not clear to him or his associates. In the end, of course, the pilot episode seems to decide that it’s up to the government to figure it out on a case by case basis, and whatever benefits the greatest number without raising too much of an Ick Factor will be allowed. That is, it comes out in favor of a fairly straight utilitarianism. The series stars Patrick Stewart as Prof. Ian Hood, a scientist who works for some shadowy department of the British government and investigages criminal activities in the realm of high science. The first episode, which premiered this past
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