‘First Among Equals’ Peeks Into Thatcher’s England

It’s not difficult to feel completely overwhelmed by television shows on DVD. On the one hand, they offer deeper, richer, and often more entertaining experiences than most movies, primarily because they’re stretched over multiple episodes and even seasons, allowing for more complex plots and characters. On the other hand, these giant boxes crammed with discs stack up on your shelves like unfinished homework, a succession of seasons and series you’ll never watch: “The Wire,” “The Sopranos,” “24,” “Lost,” and on and on — constant reminders of your failure to watch enough TV in a serious enough manner.But if these unwatched DVDs cause us mental anguish, other DVDs offer us solace. Enter the miniseries. Miniseries are like a soothing balm — a predetermined number of episodes that have a beginning, a middle, and an end. No multiple 13-episode seasons, just five, six, or sometimes 10 episodes, and we’re done. Today, for example, sees the release of the British miniseries “First Among Equals,” which will hit DVD in 10 50-minute episodes — a television event so compact it seems like a trick. The series, which originally aired in Britain in 1986, was written by the prince of the potboiler, Jeffrey Archer, who served as a member of Parliament for five years before his involvement with a failed Canadian company saw him resign with close to 500,000 pounds of debt hanging from his neck. Mr. Archer decided to write his way out of the poorhouse, and his fifth novel, “First Among Equals,” was based directly on his experience in British politics.“First Among Equals” is an excursion into the baffling world of parliamentary politics. It opens in 1964 with four members of Parliament arriving on their first day in office. There’s bookish Raymond Gould (Tom Wilkinson) for the Labour Party, evil upper-class twit Charles Seymour (Jeremy Child) for the Conservative Party, bonny Scotsman Andrew Fraser (David Robb), and decent but spookily ambitious Simon Kerslake (James Faulkner). The next nine episodes follow them for 20 years as their fortunes are whipped back and forth as if strapped to the heaving, writhing back of some great beast. Among the minor traumas that mark their ascent from backbench MPs to undersecretaries to ministers of state are bad marriages, call-girl scandals, sudden elections, vindictive fathers-in-law, and calls from the prime minister that never arrive.The politicians are exposed here, shockingly, as existing less to serve the public than to get elected and stay in office, with Byzantine power plays and backroom deals flying like a horde of startled bats. Being a British television production, the visuals comprise flat, overly lit interiors contrasted with exteriors shot in grainy 16 mm. The bafflingly fast dialogue settles into a soothing, comforting susurrus of “Masterpiece Theatre” proportions, turning this miniseries into the televisual equivalent of a bowl of chicken noodle soup: not too challenging and plenty entertaining on its own terms.But the soothing broth is spiked with a pinch of bitterness. It’s always the villains that we remember, and the wonderfully acidic Charles Seymour is eminently watchable in his monstrous snobbery. Looking down his nose at the lower classes and wishing he could pack them all off to Australia, he and his awful wife (Jane Booker) are the Lord and Lady Macbeth of this series. They deserve a television show of their own. By the time episode 10 rolls around, the power games are of less interest than the state of Seymour’s immortal but completely threadbare soul.* * *In another example of how the bad guys are the ones we really want to watch, the first in the three theatrical film incarnations of Japan’s wildly popular “Death Note” series arrives on DVD today as well. After beginning life in 2003 as a manga, “Death Note” was greeted with mass adulation. It soon became an animated series, and then three live-action movies, of which this is the first. It would be hard to find anything even remotely resembling a hero anywhere in the cast.“Death Note” pulls off the neat trick of being a movie that captures the adolescent attention span without the aid of violence, sex, or foul language. Instead, the film is all plot, all the time. After the God of Death drops a magic notebook on the ground, it is found by a law student named Light (Tatsuya Fujiwara). If you write someone’s name in the notebook, he or she will die of natural causes within 30 days.Like all things that fascinate children, the book comes with a set of simple, but infinitely expanding, rules. You must write the person’s real name; you have 6 minutes and 40 seconds to write the cause of death or they die of a heart attack, etc. Light instantly goes on a misguided, ostensibly moral crime spree, killing hundreds of convicted criminals by writing their names in his notebook and sparking a national panic.The story hits its stride when L (Ken’ichi Matsuyama), a mysterious teenage goth version of Sherlock Holmes with a killer sweet tooth, shows up and locks horns with Light in a battle of wits that spans two feature films and packs in more plot twists per square inch than seems entirely safe. Infinitely satisfying, “Death Note” is a red-meat story with two young, evil geniuses squaring off like a matchup between Lex Luthor and Brainiac, only with a Japanese pop-culture sheen. “Death Note” offers up all the twists and turns we want from the best TV shows, only instead stretching out for infinite, tortuous seasons, the whole epic wraps up in less than four hours.

‘First Among Equals’ Peeks Into Thatcher’s England

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