Don’t worry about getting bored. “The State Within,” a three-part, seven-and-a-half-hour BBC/BBC America miniseries showing on BBC America February 17, 18, and 24, is a glossy, skillful, well-acted, multilayered, and thoroughly engrossing production that has all the suspense of “24” minus the over-the-top cliff-hangers, candelabra lighting, and perpetually frayed vocal cords of Kiefer Sutherland. Rest assured, whatever happens, no one will utter a sentence such as: “A nuclear bomb is about to explode two miles from here in seven seconds. I need you to get the president on the phone, and then call…”

The program’s title alludes to the perception, common in Britain and hardly unusual here, that since the election of 2000, America has been run by a cabal bent on starting wars and willing to engineer atrocities on its own soil in order to justify them. Beginning with a British Airways flight exploding over Washington, D.C., the film pits British rationality and (mostly) good intentions against American overreaction, mendacity, and imperial greed.

It’s also a kind of left-wing fantasy about how the British-American “special relationship” ought to function.

“This war’s illegal, Lynn,” the British ambassador, Sir Mark Brydon (Jason Isaacs), tells the American secretary of state shortly after we glimpse him in front of a portrait of Winston Churchill. “Stand the planes down!” In that sense, “The State Within” might as easily have been called, “If Blair Were Not a Poodle.” To be a British pol worthy of Churchill here means opposing American aggression, while any threat emanating from the Muslim world is seen as a smokescreen behind which corporate and neoconservative skulduggery can flourish. The real villains are corporations like “Armitage” (read: Halliburton) and “CMC,” or think tanks like “the Lowenberg Institute.” Eric Ambler’s celebrated line from the 1939 novel, “A Coffin for Dimitrios” — “The most important thing to know about an assassination is not who fired a shot, but who paid for the bullet” — remains key.

The film eagerly depicts an America sliding into totalitarianism. After it is announced that the plane was blown up by a Muslim suicide bomber carrying a British passport, the governor of Virginia rounds up 200 British Muslims vacationing in his state. A panicked young Muslim couple — secular, attractive, the woman three months pregnant — is shot dead fleeing a road block. In the meantime, we learn — almost as an aside — that a million people are marching in London to protest the detentions in Virginia. Add to this a gripping subplot involving Luke Gardner (Lennie James), a British former soldier on death row in Florida, and Jane Lavery (Eva Birthistle), the comely British human rights lawyer trying to save him, it’s a left-wing Disney Land: reckless neo-cons, mephitic corporations, redneck governors, the death penalty, and Muslims being rounded up like, er…. Well, let’s go to the British ambassador, as they say on CNN.

“Where does it end?” demands Sir Mark, ambushing the chair of the Security Committee, Madeleine Cohen, in the Senate. “The detention of all Muslims in America? Sikhs? Catholics? Jews? I’m sure you’re aware of the Reichstag Decree of 1933.” “Are you accusing me of being a Nazi, Sir Brydon?” Ms. Cohen (a Democrat) asks. No answer. Enough simply to plant the thought. At moments like these, you realize this is not a film protesting American totalitarianism; it’s one that eagerly, pantingly, desires it.

Politics aside, “The State Within” does many things superbly. Particularly good is its take on Washington as the center of world power, a city in which almost every action is covertly filmed or bugged. Mr. Isaacs convincingly portrays an ambassador who, despite having a touch of James Bond, is less in the loop than his aide, Nicholas Brocklehurst (Ben Daniels), who works for MI6. Nicholas is having an affair with Christopher Styles (Noam Jenkins), America’s Undersecretary for Defense Intelligence, who works directly for the Secretary of Defense, Lynne Warner (Sharon Gless).

This is in keeping with the film’s thesis that politicians are mostly front men, whether they realize it or not. (The American president is never shown, the unmistakable implication being that to do so would be pointless, since it’s Warner — Dick Cheney in drag — who’s running the show anyway. One of the few times the president is even mentioned is when Warner says, “Of course, it’s the President’s decision” — and then smirks. The British Prime Minister is similarly invisible.)

As for journalists, they are treated as something of a joke — purveyors of useful fictions who make vague, childlike sense of hidden forces they know little about and of which the public knows almost nothing. To quote an ironic exchange between two CIA agents in Charles McCarry’s classic 1970’s espionage novel, “The Tears of Autumn”:

“That’s what newspaper are for.”

“Yes, to explain the real world.”

“There is no real world.”

Or to cite the ever-dependable Bob Dylan: “Democracy don’t rule the world / You’d better get that through your head / This world is ruled by violence / But I guess that’s better left unsaid.”

Between those two poles — “There is no real world,” and “This world is ruled by violence” — “The State Within” sets up shop, and it’s fertile thriller territory. As competing explanations mount for why the British Airways flight was blown up, and the atrocity’s relationship to a possible American invasion of Tyrgyztan, a fictional, oil-rich Muslim state in Central Asia, becomes entangled in suspicions about Armitage, the corporation the Secretary of Defense once headed, not to mention a group of British mercenaries apprehended by the FBI, this BBC film comes into its own and it makes for exceptionally exciting, conspiratorial television that sustains the tension all the way through three 150-minute episodes.

Perhaps it’s all that post-imperial blood in their veins, but the screenwriters, Lizzie Mickery and Daniel Percival, have an extraordinary ability to convey the feel of power, and to make the audience believe that what they’re witnessing is the real thing. Their interpretation of how America uses that power is unremittingly hostile, however, and utterly ungenerous. “It’s a turn-on, isn’t it?” Brocklehurst sneers at Styles. “Playing with people’s lives. Snap your fingers in Washington, the other side of the world quakes. I can smell the testosterone from here.” The fact the two men are lovers (or were — the affair is going downhill fast) only gives that last line an added zing.

“The State Within” is not only a terrific thriller, it’s also a sobering reminder of how most of the world, including much of America, views this country now. To underline the point, BBC America is airing the first two episodes over Presidents Day weekend. Nice one, mate.

bbernhard@nysun.com