"Cambridge Spies" lands in USA

As we noted in July, it was only a matter of time before the BBC's much-criticized "dramatization" made it to America. What did surprise me, however, was how Alessandra Stanley's review in yesterday's NY Times, headlined "A Ring of Droll Spies, Slightly Fictionalized", managed to acknowledge the BBC's rewriting of history and to trivialize it at the same time. Her summary:

"Cambridge Spies" has plenty of delights, including Anthony Andrews, who played Lord Sebastian Flyte in "Brideshead Revisited," as a well-meaning but batty King George VI. The series has humor, charm, sex and cloak-and-dagger suspense. It doesn't have a lot of historical perspective or psychological insight. Perhaps fittingly in a story honoring double agents, the series provides a very one-sided look at duplicity.

A more clear-eyed assessment, however, appears in today's Miami Herald:

Posted by David on October 25, 2003 4:32 PM