MI-5 DVDsMI-5 (”Spooks” in the UK) is a slick, modern take on the British version of the FBI (roughly speaking). Filmed in glorious widescreen and supplemented with a 5.1 surround sound track, the show tracks a small tight-knit team of operatives as they infiltrate and take on threats to British national security. This covers the gamut from your common every day terrorists to violent anti-abortion protestors (with badly affected Southern American drawls), race riot inciters, and traitors from within. It takes issues of the day, dramatizes them in a major way, and lets loose for an hour that grips you and drags you along for the ride.

It’s a very smart series, filled with conversations about international politics as well as tense confrontations that don’t always rely on explosions and gunfire to keep the plot moving. That stuff is there, but it’s very much underplayed. Much of it happens off-camera.

The characters are all written in shades of grey. They MI-5ers are good guys, but they do things that you wouldn’t expect the All-American Hero television star to do. They cheat, they fudge, they lie, they get into massive trouble. You never know what’s going to happen next, and the series takes a couple of major chances to overturn the status quo in the mere six episodes it has in the series. Each episode is its own story, but some subplots carry through, so it’s best watched in order. At the end of the sixth episode, though, you get resolution to those ongoing bits, along with a couple of new and more tantalizing questions for the second series.

We also see how The Job affects the character’s lives. The series lead, for example, is in a relationship with a woman that began when he was working under cover. As their relationship grows, he struggled with how to tell her the truth without upsetting her. She still calls him by his assumed name. It’s the secret that threatens to tear them apart. Egads, this sounds like some bad soap opera plot now. Really, it’s handled better than that.

Each episode runs a full 60 minutes. When A&E aired it here in the States, the channel cut out 15 minutes of each episode to squeeze in commercials. I’m very happy I didn’t watch this series that way. I can understand why some people found the Americanized version to be choppy.

This three DVD set contains all six episodes from the first series. Each has its own commentary track, although I haven’t had the chance to listen to those yet. There are small interviews with people from behind the scenes (such as the first episodes’ director, the show’s creators, and actors), text writeups on the characters (that I skip, because I prefer to know about the show from watching the show), and more.

The video transfer is pristine. It’s presented in anamorphic widescreen and looks terrific. The surround sound isn’t called on that often, but the shows sounds fine as they are.

It’s a great series, and I can’t wait to see more of it.