Robson Green and Nicola Walker

Touching Evil: The Complete Collection (Acorn) – Debuting in 1999, the British crime series Touching Evil established a grimmer, darker kind of mystery show, a modern urban noir set in an almost airless world of gloomy offices bereft of overhead lighting and viewed through a haze of dust and smoke. Robson Green stars as Dave Creegan, the haunted, tightly wrapped lead investigator in London’s Organized and Serial Crime Unit. The scar on his forehead is a constant reminder of his near death experience and the toll of the job: no one gets out of this unscathed. His partner Susan Taylor (Nicola Walker) finds the line between her personal life and her cases blur, and junior squad member Mark Rivers (Shaun Dingwell) goes through a tormenting trial by fire—and trial under fire—to prove his courage and his competence to the unit and to himself. By the third series, Creegan returns from a nervous breakdown more unstable than ever yet almost pathologically driven to return to the career that cost him his family, his sanity, and at one point his life.

Created by Paul Abbot (State of Play), it’s the flip side of British TV’s other great cop show, “Prime Suspect,” but like that beloved series it hums with incisive writing, sharply etched characters, and dramatic intensity. It’s as much about how the torment, second guessing, and guilt hounds and destroys the investigators as it is about tracking serial killers. Police stories have rarely been more frank or uncompromising. Eight feature-length episodes on three discs in a box set. No supplements.

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The Golden Age Of Television (Criterion) – The title is no hyperbole: For a brief period in the 1950s, as television was coming of age, a handful of showcase anthology shows turned live television theater into the vibrant center of original American drama. It came from New York rather than Los Angeles, where ambitious producers pushed young writers to writer dynamic contemporary teleplays and drew casts from a new generation of hungry young actors (many of them trained in the Actor’s Studio) and New York stage veterans alike. And in the days before videotape and before filmed programs were the norm, these were all performed and broadcast live, partly because of the attitude that live TV was not just a program, it was an event). (The accompanying booklet, written by TV historian and Paley Center for Media curator Ron Simon, gives a much more complete background to the culture of live TV.) The production realities of live multi-camera shoots were both a restriction and an opportunity for creative solutions: an expressive visual language was born and evolved for a brief period, until film became the TV drama standard and brought a more conventional style with it. But it was only when the focus shifted from adaptations of classic novels and plays to original contemporary stories, written by a new generation of writers who watched the evolution of American society in the years after the war and wanted to get their observations into their stories, that everything came together: stories that viewers could relate to, scripts that inspired the best from the directors, drama that rose to the levels of the most gripping contemporary stage plays and actors who devoured the roles in a one-night-only performance.

Patterns: Ed Begley, Everett Sloane and Richard Kiley

This collection features eight landmark productions from that short-lived era, from the original Marty (1953), written by Paddy Chayefsky and starring Rod Steiger as the lonely working class butcher, to the original Days of Wine and Roses (1958), directed by John Frankenheimer (the most fluid, dense and dynamic of live TV directors) and starring Cliff Robertson. Both of these production were expanded into acclaimed feature films, as were many other productions featured in this set: Rod Serling’s dissection of corporate culture Patterns (1955) and his poignant Requiem for a Heavyweight (1956), the bumpkin comedy No Time for Sergeants (1955) that made Andy Griffith a star (in both versions), and Bang the Drum Slowly (1959), with a pre-stardom Paul Newman learning his craft in front of the camera. Because they were live and unseen since their original broadcast (at least until 1980s revival on PBS), these original were largely forgotten next the polish of the feature film adaptations, but live TV brought out something unique to these dramas: an intensity, an urgency, an intimacy, and an expressive storytelling language combining theater conventions and film technique with the intimacy of the small screen and the creative solutions to production limitations. “It was live,” explains Keenan Wynn in the introduction to one drama. “Not perfect, but live.” A Wind from the South (1955) starring Julie Harris and Rod Serling’s searing show-business drama The Comedian (1957) fill out of the collection. The Comedian is a perfect illustration of these limitations turned into strengths, with its feral performance by Mickey Rooney and the almost claustrophobic intensity created by director John Frankenheimer, who fills the screen with a density of background detail and a flurry of action while zeroing in on the dramatic center with laser-like precision. It couldn’t be more different from Marty only four years earlier, where Delbert Mann pulled the camera back to show characters almost isolated in their drab environments, rarely going in for the close-up, letting Steiger’s body language communicate not just his loneliness but his resignation to living out his life as “a fat, ugly little man.” You can see the evolution of language and technique in four short years, but also just how defining the director’s eye can be on live television.

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The Anthony Horowitz-created British mystery series Foyle’s War ran from 2002 to 2008 in Britain and on public television in the U.S., and chronicled World War II from the homefront perspective of Detective Chief Inspector Foyle (Michael Kitchen), a World War I veteran assigned to solving domestic murders in rural villages in and around the coastal town of Hastings in Southeast Britain. The series of feature-length mysteries began in 1940, in the uncertain early days of the war while Fascist sympathies were still sounding off and America kept its distance, and moves chronologically through historical flashpoints (seen askew through the prism of Foyle’s own domestic challenges) all the way through to the end of hostilities and the closing of the station. Foyle’s War: From Dunkirk to VE Day (Acorn) gathers all of the previously released collections into a single, space-efficient 19-disc box set of five standard cases with hinged trays.

Foyle's crew

Foyle would rather be involved with the war effort than solving domestic murders in rural towns but his quietly incisive and soft-spoken manner provides a necessary service to the folks at home. His dogged pursuits are driven by a sense of justice yet haunted by his frustration and his apprehension at his son’s enlistment in the RAF. Foyle knows the horrors of war and would shield his grown boy if he could. The mysteries themselves are secondary to atmosphere and texture of British life and war jitters, and the slow development of Foyle’s team: war casualty Milner (Anthony Howell), who spends months coming to terms with his lost leg and the meaning of the war itself before settling in as Foyle’s right hand man, and driver Sam (Honeysuckle Weeks) as a would-be Nancy Drew with moxie and initiative—becomes one of the major pleasures of the low key series. Along the way, Horowitz explores the hysteria of nationalism and fear of foreign nationals, the unsettling domestic Fascist movement, the campaign to send the children out of London during the Blitz, the black market, looters, the uneasy tensions when the Yanks arrive and the mix of relief and tension as everyone awaits the official suspension of war powers after the surrender of Germany in the satisfying, bittersweet series finale. These shows are an intelligent and thoughtful look at a period not often plumbed for drama and stir historical events into the fictional stories, which gives the already smartly written shows a further injection of authenticity. It’s the rare series worth owning.

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The Middleman and Wendy: the pop-art phase

The Middleman is my discovery of the week, a TV series that ran for a brief but brilliant twelve episodes on the ABC Family Channel last fall before it succumbed to dismal ratings. Perhaps it would have found its audience on the SciFi Channel (now just identified by the mutant SyFy logo). Perhaps a cult audience will likewise discover this deliciously tongue-in-cheek spy fantasy series on DVD and the groundswell of support will revive it like Family Guy. (I can dream, can’t I?) All I know is that it was canceled before I had really heard about it, let alone ever seen an episode, and it had me in the first ten minutes of the pilot episode. Matt Keeslar is a Boy Scout of a special agent – part Men in Black operative, part Doctor Who freelance good guy with a faceless boss and a crotchety receptionist robot stuck in battle-axe mode – who specializes in unconventional cases (aliens, demons, a genetically enhanced super-ape that aspires to be a mafia Don). and Natalie Morales is Wendy Watson, an art-school grad and sidekick in training scouted by The Middleman (it’s apparently his name, his job and his rank all in one) from her adventures in temping. Keeslar is both colorful and clean, like Jack Bauer with impeccable manners and kick-ass skills, while Morales is Piper Perabo with a dash of Rosario Dawson. And by jiminy, it’s gosh-darn great, absolutely hilarious and marvelously inventive, a rare gem of genre TV that both lovingly quotes and hilariously parodies its inspiration. It deserves to be seen by everyone who likes their genre TV funny, clever and hip as they come. More on this when I complete the series. For now, I’m doling the episodes out like precious treats.

Criterion originally released Repulsion on laserdisc, the old-school high-definition standard of the pre-DVD age. For its long-awaited DVD and Blu-ray debut, Criterion goes back to the original elements for a beautiful new digital transfer approved by director Roman Polanski. "I always considered Repulsion as the shabbiest of my films," confesses Polanski in the commentary track, originally recorded in 1994 for the laserdisc, referring to the technical seams and budgetary limitations. Reviewing the film after decades, it’s in fact a masterfully conducted portrait in madness, a horror defined not in the the murders perpetrated by an unbalanced young woman (Catherine Deneuve) losing herself in nightmares and phobias, but in the loss of self as the alienated Belgian beauty disconnects from the world and unravels into her fantasies and fears. Deneuve’s Carol is a child-woman both fascinated and repulsed by sex, but her nightmare fantasies of rape also suggest repressed memories of abuse bubbling to the surface in her isolation and urban alienation. Polanski doesn’t explain, he explores with imaginative detail and eerie imagery (walls split with a thundercrack, hands reach out from the hallway like a Cocteau nightmare, food decomposes) as the fragile girl slips into helpless madness. One thing is certain: Apartment living is dangerous to your mental health and your soul in Polanski’s movies. This is his first victim.

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