MI-5

Holy cow. Where to even begin?? It is SO gratifying to watch something with so many brains, so much talent, enormous balls, and no stick-thin women.
Granted, I have only watched the very first episode so far, but I have zero doubt that I will not come down from this TV high until the whole thing’s over.
Here in the USA, we have crime shows up the wazoo. What we don’t have are crime shows which, in their very first episode, have pro-lifers as the most wanted people in town. But that is episode one of MI-5, the story of a few agents in the British Security Service.
Shot, and set, in 2002, this show begins firmly in a post-9/11 world. Muslim radicals are the big bad guys. However, there are also the pro-lifers to worry about. A crazy Florida lady has slipped past the authorities and traveled to England to continue the work that her husband began. Twenty bombs have been set loose in England, all to kill doctors who perform abortions. So now MI-5 has the unpleasant task of finding them.
I said it has talent: Matthew Macfadyen (Pride and Prejudice, Incendiary, Death at a Funeral) plays Tom, a lead agent, but his girlfriend knows him as Matthew…awkward. Keeley Hawes (Death at a Funeral, ShakepeaRE-told, and married to Macfadyen) and her obscene cheekbones plays Zoe, the resident beautiful agent. Americans play the aggressive assholes. Noted.
To see a show about a nut-balls American made by Brits is humbling, to say the least. That they share my (pardon the expression) values (sorry, I couldn’t think of another way) is not the important part. The important part is that watching this confirmed for me just how ridiculous these fundamentalists really are. Equating abortion to shooting children in a schoolyard? Killing people in the name of protecting life? Absurd. The big lesson here, that people forget too often, is that flying planes into buildings is not the only way that terrorism works.