Spooks/MI-5

I have this slight obsession with movies based on Jane Austen novels. Shut up. Anyway, I recently Netflixed the newest BBC version of Persuasion, (which is COMPLETELY fabulous by the way) and fell hard and fast for the beautiful blonde man who played Captain Wentworth. As soon as I'd wiped the last tear from my eye after Capt. and Mrs. Wentworth danced on the lawn of their new/old home, I got on IMDB and looked him up. And it turned out he was on the later seasons of some British spy series called Spooks/MI-5 (Spooks is the name in the UK, but it's marketed as MI-5 on this side of the pond.) Hot spies with British accents? Sign me up! I Netflixed the first season, and was promptly hooked. (I'm well into Season 2 and Capt. Wentworth still hasn't turned up. But the Jane Austen eye candy quotient is currently being filled by the lovely and talented actor who played Mr. Darcy(!) in the excellent 2006 version of Pride & Prejudice. (The one with Keira Knightley and her fubar wig).)

Ahem, anyway, apart from the hotness of its stars, I'm enjoying MI-5 for what seems like its semi-realistic (I'm guessing, no personal experience here) depiction of spy life. There are no Alias-like glamour missions in wigs and lingerie. The spies are more likely to go under cover as IT technicians or cleaning ladies. And they mess up. ALL the time. In ways that humans mess up, and that increases the amusement factor. And the danger they face due to their cock-ups never seems trumped up, but always very real. And I can't fail to mention the pleasure this anglophile is experiencing from the sheer British-ness of it all. In one scene in the first season, a spy meets an informer in the middle of an empty field, and both spy and informer are wearing, completely unironically and with no pretense whatsoever, WELLIES! Because apparently that's what British (and Irish) men wear when they're walking in an empty field! I love it.