Just what I expected

A brilliant film that helped define a genre

While it is a pity that the story wasn't told with more visual finesse, this is trivial compared to our real-world problems. It takes a good movie to put that into perspective.

One of those movie experiences that is so good it makes you realize you've been grading everything else on a curve.

This could have been a good drama - but it was spoiled by the truly dreadful and intrusive incidental music and the over indulgent wallowing in the mores and manners of the 1950s BBC.

THE HOUR is a decent 2-hour movie crammed into a 6-hour miniseries.It's about a ground-breaking BBC news show in 1956, in which the daring, progressive news team dares to face down the government and its undercover minions! Doesn't this sound like a thousand other BBC plots: government=bad, journalists=good! Of course, the bad government is carrying on a bad war, and covering it up with evil spies! I wonder if we're supposed to draw any comparisons with more recent history. Hmm!Some people compare this with MAD MEN, seemingly for the sole reason that it's set in the 1950s. For me, it's like a bad British remake of BROADCAST NEWS with a spy plot grafted on. By the last episode, it's easy to forget all the details of the setup, although I must say the writer did a decent job of explaining the whole plot (something the Beeb often forgets to do). The main character is an annoying little git who looks like Frank Sinatra's famous mug shot photo. The rest of the cast is more tolerable, including a tightly-wound Anton Lesser, the versatile Julian Rhind-Tutt in a semi-tough guy role (hard to take seriously with those dorky 50s glasses), and Burn Gorman, sinister as usual with his mouth like a badly-healed scar.Having worked in broadcasting for many years, I enjoyed the behind-the-scenes aspect of the plot. The spy subplot needed LOTS of tightening, but even so the series was worth a watch.

Behind the Machinations of BBC: A Debut Series from the Brits, August 18, 2011 By Grady Harp (Los Angeles, CA United States) - See all my reviews (TOP 10 REVIEWER) (VINE VOICE) (REAL NAME) This review is from: Hour (DVD) Summer seems to be test time for new series for the television audience and so far the shows that are coming out of Britain look the most promising. First we had the abbreviated 3 episode appetizer ZEN which in its short run got progressively more interesting and promising and now come THE HOUR from BBC America. The series just debuted in what appeared to be prolonged trailer for the long series that hopefully will continue: the title refers to a television news broadcast that is created before our eyes, the final scenes being a toast to this new venture acting as an overture to what is to come. Overtures to operas usually introduce themes that will appear in the opera that follows once the curtain opens and that is how THE HOUR comes across. This is a time piece set in the 1950s when Cold War-era England was awash in the news of the Suez crisis, one of Britain's sharpest intimations of loss, with a more intimate look at sex, ambition and espionage in the workplace along with the world wide speculation of JFK as a vice presidential candidate in the US. It's a time of unsettling change, except at the BBC, where even driven reporters are assigned to do feel-good newsreels about débutante balls and royal visits. The series opener, written by Bafta Award-winning Abi Morgan, takes us behind the scenes of the launch of a topical news program in London 1956, and introduces a highly competitive, sharp-witted and passionate love triangle at the heart of the series through the lives of enigmatic producer Bel Rowley (Romola Garai) and her rivals, journalist Freddie Lyon (Ben Wishaw) and anchorman Hector Madden (Dominic West): we will begin to see the decade on the threshold of change - from the ruthless sexual politics behind the polite social façade of the Fifties to the revelations that redefined the world for a new generation. Aside from the behind the scenes views and devious workings of the BBC we also see the beginning of a crime element in which the victim is touted as being part of a robbery while the ever-suspicious and career climbing Freddie sees it as a murder to be investigated. There are 1950s reminders of Debutante Balls, the universal cigarette smoking habits, the 'gentlemen only clubs' where women are not allowed (secondary citizens, you know!), and all the clothes and hats that reek of the 50s. The cast is rich in fine British actors (Juliet Stevenson and Tim Pigott-Smith appear briefly in roles that will likely be expanded, Anna Chancellor is the acid tongued foreign correspondent, Burn Gorman is the suspicious, hatted man, etc), but if were only Ben Wishaw and Romola Garai and Domenic West every week the show would sail. There is a lot of style and sophistication and just the right amount of British intrigue and humor that almost sure that this series will fly. Grady Harp

this is one of the most boring, poorly written and self-indulgently directed shows ever. if you don't fall asleep you must be on crystal meth, or really used to watching bbc period drama productions.there are several superb actors. among other factors, what lets the side down is the plodding, pretentious pace of development and the seriously anachronistic lashings of political correctness. the latter is lethal to any sense of verisimilitude.anarchic humour --the office, monty python, shameless-- is what the brits do better than Americans, not to mention also 'youf' shows like skins and the inbetweeners. but because the bbc is above all a preachy, paternalistic and politicized monolith, it cannot do TELEVISION.the British are incapable of six feet under, sopranos, true blood etc etc --just as the Americans are ludicrously incapable of shameless or the office. and here they prove they are incapable of mad men --every British reviewer leeching onto this comparison.needless to say, brit newspaper reviewers have rallied around the flag, though few enthusiastically.the reality is that this show would never have been produced, must less broadcast anywhere in the world where the government does not extort an annual television fee, and where viewer response has no impact whatsoever upon the commissioning editors.