02.26.08 5:00 AM CST
• TV & DVDs
• Jamie Malanowski
Once a form that contained television’s most creative work, the mini-series is a dying breed on American television. After all, why take a six-hour movie and show it over three nights—playing havoc with your schedule in the process—when you can pad the show with four, or seven, or even eighteen hours of additional material, and have a nice series that could become appointment programming? Whether it’s The Wire or Dirt or The Tudors, the short series is the creative and economic model everyone is embracing.However, to get a look at how appealing a good miniseries can be, take a look at State of Play, a British drama from a couple years back that arrives on DVD in stores today. State of Play is a twisty tale about journalism and politics and scandal and murder, and even if our scruffy reporter protagonist is up to his earlobes in squishy conflicts-of-interest, and even if our earnest politician seems too obviously a golden boy from the start, there are enough surprises to keep things lively. The leads are a little uni-dimensional, but there’s very good acting in the secondary roles, including before-we-knew-them appearances by Kelly MacDonald (No Country for Old Men), James McAvoy (Atonement), Polly Walker (Rome), and, in a deliciously nudgy-winky performance as the paper’s editor-in-chief, Bill Nighy (Pirates of the Caribbean.) Catch the series now—next year, Hollywood remakes State of Play as a conventional two-hour movie, with Russell Crowe as the reporter, Ben Affleck as the politician, and Helen Mirren as the editor, no doubt with a lot fewer nudges and winks.
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