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ACTION
TV ONLINE EPISODE GUIDE
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Synopsis: A chemical bomb explodes in London and a terror alert hits the New York subway. British intelligence agents are mobilised in a joint operation with US counter-terrorism operatives. Can they find the terrorist cell responsible? Publicity : Television loves scaring its audiences, particularly when it comes to the new bogeymen - terrorists - who are rapidly supplanting serial killers as TV drama's enemy of choice. So here we have The Grid; a great big glossy and expensive BBC/US television co-production with terrorist attacks on innocent people at its heart. (The entire series is to be screened in three chunks this week on consecutive nights). We are flung straight into the action when a know of Middle-Eastern terrorists meets in a London hotel to prepare a gas attack - on whom, we don't know. But due to a spectacularly odd and careless slip by one of the terrorists, things go badly wrong from the outset. Many people, including the terrorists, dies instantly. Cue security services on both sides of the Atlantic (this is where the co-production bit comes in), who leap into action before bickering between themselves over who has jurisdiction over whom. It's all tremendously fast-paced and looks good (so it should, The Grid cost $20 million to make). But there are frequent betrayals of its mainly American origins, particularly in the dialogue, where characters have to go into painfully slow interlocutions about religion, world events and so on. There
are also recognisable dramatic clichés - the maverick
secret agent with a bruised heart for whom the hunt for the
terrorists is terribly personal, and the idealistic young doctor
who, against his better judgement, is coerced into becoming
part of a terrorist network for the good of his people. Still,
The Gird rattles along and it's a good yarn, whether or not
it bears any relation to reality. And it's got Bernard Hill
in it, as a crusty British counter-terrorist operative. We don't
see him often enough, but you'll be glad he's around (Radio
Times article by Alison Graham). Jemma
Redgrave is probably most recognisable for her role in the eponymous
series Bramwell.
Synopsis: After her failure to stop the Lagos bombings, Maren Jackson's elite team is officially disbanded, But the group continue to work in secret as the terror network put their second plan into motion. Raza Michaels, aided by Emily Tuthill, starts to follow the money trail from Switzerland to the terrorists. Publicity : With such a famous family, it's inevitable that Jemma Redgrave is sometimes accused of trading on her surname. "It opens doors, absolutely," says the 39-year old, "But it doesn't get you a job… you only get it if you're a good actor." Jemma's CV certainly proves that she's good. Although best known for starring in the long-running Victorian medical drama Bramwell, she's been seen in recent years in The Swap, Mosley (alongside Jonathan Cake, with whom she was romantically linked during a separation from Tim Owen, her QC husband of 12 years), Amnesia and, this week, as an MI6 operative in The Grid. Jemma
(or Red Gravy as she was nicknamed at school) was 13 when she
decided to follow in her family's footsteps (her father is Corin,
her grandfather Michael and her aunts Vanessa and Lynn, while
Natasha and Joely Richardson are her cousins) and join a youth
theatre. Now she has two young children of her own (Gabriel,
ten, and Alfie, four) and suspects at least one of them will
keep up the family tradition. "Gabriel wants to write comedy,"
she says. "Well, that's what he wants to do at the moment."
(Radio Times article by Jane Rackham).
Synopsis: The explosive conclusion to this thought-provoking drama sees Maren and Max in pursuit of the teenager planning a US-based attack. In the meantime, Raghib orchestrates a terrorist assault in London, while a cabal of other young Muslims prepare a similar salvo in the Middle East. Can Maren's team track them all down? If Muhammed is caught, will that really be the end of the story? Publicity : Global terrorists are television's new bogeymen, the shady figures propelling television drama into a landscape changed for ever by the 11 September attacks. Presumably because the wounds cut on that awful day remain too deep, producers have been shy of looking directly at its events. But more generally, terrorism has become fertile dramatic ground, both established drama and in the case of The Grid, screened on BBC2 this week across three consecutive nights. It's a slick and glossy $20 million drama serial focussing on US and British counter-terrorist operatives working to avert a devastating co-ordinated Arab terrorist attack in three countries. Though the lion's share of the funding was put up by the American cable network TNT, the BBC also contributed money to a series full of well-known US and British faces, including Julianna Marguiles and Bernard Hill, and which was filmed here, across the Atlantic and in Morocco. Gareth Neame, the BBC's head of independent drama commissioning (he brought Spooks, State of Play and Hustle to our screens), oversaw the co-production. He says that the BBC's contribution to that $20 million was significant, but adds, "It's a small proportion of the total, so we certainly haven't paid over the odds or spent more than we would normally spend." Neame also tweaked The Grid's content in the editing suite for its British audience (the series went out on US TV last month to largely positive reviews). "I did some re-cutting, though not much. But there was no re-shooting." Any potential problems when a producer attempts to please two very different audiences were, says Neame, tackled during the development stage. But certain scenes may still jar with British audiences. For instance, Marguiles' character at one point launches into a rather heavy-handed account of Islam and its attitudes towards women, an account that is automatically addressed by a Muslim colleague. Was
Neame at all uncomfortable with such scenes? "This is an
issue in a co-production like The Grid, but the Americans involved
had to think about an audience with perhaps a somewhat less
broad view than us of world events. Some things had to be explained."
Neame was also keen that the series, written and directed by
Americans, was as thoughtful and as balanced as possible. Last
year his series Spooks was at the eye of a huge storm when Muslim
groups vociferously complained about one episode involving young
Muslim suicide bombers. "When we were developing The Grid,
I'd only recently gone through that Spooks experience, so I
was mindful of it. If you ever try to do these dramas where
the person planting bombs is just a mad person dressed in funny
clothes, that's just not scary, as they're not a real character.
With a project of this scope, we wanted to understand the terrorists'
motivation (Radio Times article by Alison Graham).
The series was written by Tracey Alexander and Ken Friedman and directed by Mikael Saloman
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 In a crafty piece of scheduling the three-part The Grid appeared not long after the similarly-themed The Hamburg Cell, and just before the third anniversary of the 11 September attacks. But while The Hamburg Cell was based firmly on reported fact, The Grid is a work of pure fiction from the pens of a pair of American writers, although it feels at times as though the series has been written by committee in an attempt to ensure that nobody is offended by the content.  Having the title that the series does, a fair bit of globetrotting takes place here, with settings such as London, New York, Lagos, Cairo, Sa'ana, and Riyadh appearing. Toronto stood in for the American-set scenes, while Morocco was used for any scenes covering the Middle East. The amount of money spent on the drama clearly shows and allowed for the multitude of filming locations. Effects are good, with the explosion at the hotel in Jordan in Part Three being particularly effective. The action shifts from one place to another quickly, ensuring that the pace is swift, although this does mean that the viewer has to pay careful attention as to who is who and what is happening. The audience is assisted in this task by the large number of on-screen captions that appear periodically throughout the course of the series.  While the series starts off promising, the plot unfortunately flags as the story goes on, with the America-set sections suffering particularly. The main "heroes" are not particularly memorable or likeable, apart from Bernard Hill's Derek Jennings and Jemma Redgrave's Emily Tuthill. Likewise, any sympathy that the viewer might have for the plight of Raghib Mutar is negated by his willingness to inflict pain and suffering on others. The series was originally shown on the US cable channel TNT, with the British broadcast coming soon after on BBC2. As yet, it has not been released commercially in any format. Text © Chris Orton, 2004. |