West Wing is among my favorite TV shows, so this makes sense.
I finished watching Tinker, Taylor, Soldier, Spy today. It was great. Not the ground breaking or transcendent experience the The Singing Detective yielded, but very good nonetheless.
This Mini-Series stars Alec Guinness as a semi-retired high ranking official in The Circus, the most top secret and elite of all British Cold War Intelligence centers. When some operations go south, the head of The Circus discovers that there is a mole among their the other top members of the organization. When an operation to capture a Czech general results in a British Spy being captured it is up to Guinness's George Smiley to come out of retirement and secretly root out the mole.
This is a take no prisoners teleplay, and I mean that in regards to the audience. If you're not going to pay close attention to long scenes of actors sitting in cramped white walled rooms talking about things we don't understand, even through the little context we are given, you'll be left behind. I reminded me a lot of the Wire, where the writers don't care if you get it or not, if you put in the time and effort you'll be rewarded ten fold.
There are seven episodes each running roughly 50 minutes and by episode 5 I was still wondering if I was going to wrap my head around everything. But when each episode would end and I'd start the next there was a little recap of sorts. They would replay the final scene of the previous episode, but often from different angles to refresh your memory. I found that each time I'd be able to list everything I knew, though that didn't mean that I had a grasp on the big pictures. Which is brilliant because neither do Smiley and his crew. You need that one piece of the puzzle in order to step back and fully untangle all the threads of evidence. And when it comes, its still not a "Eureka!" moment, as only Smiley is an intelligent enough man to really figure it out. It also helps that his character was an intelligence officer for decades and was able to use a lifetime of knowledge to see the master plan in its entirety.
Of course Alec Guinness shines as the cool and resourceful George Smiley. His performance was so good I spent a lot of time wondering if he were the actual mole and just using the opportunity to gaze at secret documents as a final play before fully defecting.
I strongly recommend this to the Spy Film fans among you, but again, this film more accurately reflects Cold War espionage. There isn't much gun play, and when there is its not glamorous or exciting. The real work is done sifting through files, connecting the dots by finding them in operations of the past and secret orders. All while navigating the personal politics of office life amped up 1000x through the setting of an Intelligence Office.
Grade A-