I just finished watching the first season of the BBC tv series “Spooks,” or, as it’s known in the US, “MI-5.” What, I ask, is wrong with “Spooks”? American audiences are too literal? It sounds too much like a horror film? Whatever you call it, it’s a good show, a full 59:00 of drama, with all of the requisite gadgets, sting operations, undercover agents, and technological trickery you’d expect from a British spy show. In watching all of the extras on the dvds, you get the sense the producers were going for an American-feeling show, as they all seem to be obsessed with American dramas like “ER.” The show features a lot of quick cutting, split-screens, and some dialogue that probably verges on the corny. Its foreign-ness buys it some freedom to be slightly over-dramatic, and besides, I’m really hooked in now.

The second season (or second “series” as they call it in the UK) is out on dvd in January, so I’ll have to wait until then to see whether or not Tom’s girlfriend Ellie and her daughter Maisy survive the cliff-hanger ending involving the semtex in the laptop and the security lock that won’t let them out because Maisy covered the keycard with chocolate. So that sounds a lot more silly than it was; Aimee, having never seen an episode and paying minimal attention to this one, had to go online immediately and find out how season two began to see if they survived. I prefer my perch on the cliff for another few months.