Family of Spies Comes In From the Cold

A print ad for the new ABC series “Under Cover” promises: “The perfect marriage. The perfect children. The perfect home. The perfect cover.”

What “Under Cover” isn’t is the perfect spy story. Not by a mile.

It probably is TV’s first spy family series, though.

Yes, CBS last season depicted a real-life father-son espionage team in “Family of Spies: The Walker Espionage Ring.” And PBS in 1989 gave us man-and-wife spies on opposite sides in Bernard and Fiona Samson of Len Deighton’s “Game, Set and Match.”

Yet, neither presented anything close to the cozy family unit that we meet in “Under Cover,” which gets a special two-hour premiere at 9 tonight on Channels 3, 7, 10 and 42 before resuming in its regular 9 p.m. Saturday time slot. Part spy, part yuppie, these are TV’s new spuppies.

“Under Cover” is an appropriate name for any series exiled to the obscurity of Saturday-night Siberia opposite NBC. What the title refers to, though, are the perilous spy adventures of Dylan and Kate Del’Amico (Anthony John Denison and Linda Purl) and that big lug, their friend Flynn (John Rhys-Davies). All three work for a secret task force operated by fatherly Stuart Merriman (Josef Sommer) for a government agency resembling the CIA.

What sets the Del’Amicos apart from other secret agents is not only their incredible talent as spies, but also their domesticity: The house, the kids, the soccer practice, the works. Except that when Dad or Mom leave home for the office, the office that day could be Beirut.

Although it’s these padded home-front scenes that screechingly halt “Under Cover” on a dime, it’s the spy genre itself that may be moribund, at least on TV.

We meet the Del’Amicos and Flynn as they’re fleeing from Iranian fundamentalists in 1980, then pick them up a decade later with Dylan about to be fingered as a Soviet double agent. Of course he isn’t, how else could he be the hero of an ABC-TV series?

Very slowly, but not too surely, meanwhile, we embark on one of those right-wing-wanting-to-turn-the-clock-back-to-the-Cold-War tales, with Dylan, Kate and Flynn ultimately merging in the Ukraine (the handsome locales are actually Yugoslavia), where “Under Cover” proceeds to collapse faster than the Berlin Wall.

It’s the collapse of the Cold War--with the Soviets and Eastern Europe undergoing cataclysmic political change and the White House responding with a bear hug--that may have put the kibosh on serious spy stories. Or at least made them so challenging to write that even John le Carre sextuplets could not produce enough intelligent ones to sustain a weekly TV series.

Global politics are so fluid and volatile these days, moreover, that old lines in the sand are constantly being redrawn, making the spy scenarist’s task an especially hazardous one. Although “Under Cover” does attempt to resurrect that old reliable--the KGB bogeyman--in a fashion, this stock spy device is much softer in the center than in the days when Le Carre was writing about Karla.

So what’s left? Additional Cold Warriors reborn? Save the glasnosters from the anti- glasnosters ? Assassination plots against Mikhail Gorbachev? A conspiracy to return Noriega henchmen to power in Panama? Rehashing Sandinistas and contras in Nicaragua? The Marcos crowd plotting in the Philippines? Infiltrating Colombian drug rings? It all sounds rather familiar.

Future episodes of “Under Cover” are set in Washington, Ireland, China, Berlin and Peru, and the two-part second episode that begins Saturday finds Dylan, Kate and Flynn rendezvousing in Kuwait, whose invasion by Iraq has been predicted by Merriman. Easy for him to say now that it’s already happened.

The story has a renegade Iraqi colonel preparing to “launch World War III,” only to be stopped--this shouldn’t ruin the ending for you--by the task force. Then, presumably, it’s back to car-pooling.

Because it’s from “China Beach” creators William Broyles Jr. and John Sacret Young, “Under Cover” arrives with a certain amount of built-in credibility. And although Denison is just a little bit too cool, the cast is very good, and Sommer is especially interesting as the controlled, unflinching, not-quite-bloodless bureaucrat Merriman. When he softly says about the agency, “We’re all there is between order and chaos,” you believe he believes it.

With emblazoned world events as its stage, however, “Under Cover” comes across as strikingly pastel and diminished by the Realpolitik of newspaper headlines and TV newscasts. How can you believe in a KGB honcho who repeatedly calls the Soviet Union “Russia” while inside the distinctly non-Russian Ukraine, for example? Or believe that he would actually pour out such discredited Communist rhetoric as, “We don’t worship money. We live and breathe ideas”?

Because “Under Cover” seems to take itself seriously, it’s hard not to compare it--unfavorably--with the engrossing new theatrical movie “The Russia House,” and some of the serious British spy dramas that have flourished on TV here.

Best of all was “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy,” with Alec Guinness absolutely superb as Le Carre’s steely, utterly collected spy chief George Smiley, in a stunning Cold War epic notable for its infinite layers of intrigue.

Guinness reprised the role in a superior TV version of Le Carre’s “Smiley’s People,” and another Le Carre novel, the semi-autobiographical “A Perfect Spy,” recently fared well on TV. With graying Ian Holm as the burned-out Bernard Samson playing East-West games in Berlin, London and Mexico, moreover, “Game, Set and Match” was yet another enthralling spy thriller.

Yet the brilliant “Reilly: Ace of Spies”--which celebrated the exploits of a famed British super-spy thought to have been assassinated by the Bolsheviks in 1925--was most akin to “Under Cover” in terms of their heroes’ secretive globe-hopping.

But there the similarity ends. Although Sam Neill’s Sidney Reilly had almost a James Bond flair for spectacle, he was so enigmatic and ruthlessly pragmatic that there has never been another dramatized spy quite like him.

He died with his secrets, and perhaps that’s the essential difference. “Under Cover” has no secrets, only spying and soccer practice.