TV Reviews : ‘Sleepers’ Awakens to a Vastly Changed World

“Sleepers,” a four-part satiric slap at post- glasnost spying, probably looked like a fresh subject when the BBC shot it earlier this year. But the subsequent Soviet coup has played a mean trick on this KGB spy yarn, which is riddled with other problems as well and is certainly a curiosity for “Masterpiece Theatre.” (It begins Sunday at 8 p.m. on KVCR Channel 24 and at 9 p.m. on KCET Channel 28 and KPBS Channel 15. KOCE Channel 50 will air it Tuesdays at 8 p.m.)

Although the comedy is set in 1990, world events have far outstripped the image of the flustered CIA, M15 and KGB agents here, whose antics suggest an old Cold War spy caper. One of the Soviet spies (Joanna Kanska) is under the illusion that she’s Greta Garbo in “Ninotchka.”

The sleepers of the title are two Soviet KGB officers (the suave Nigel Havers and the gruff Warren Clarke), missing from the Kremlin since they were planted in London 25 years earlier. They’ve since become consummate, happy and productive Englishmen; now the Kremlin wants them back.

That’s a sufficiently clever concept and the co-stars are a flavorful odd couple (Havers as high society and Clarke as a bloke of a shop steward). But John Flanagan and Andrew McCulloch’s script appears to have been stretched and twisted from a workable two-hour movie into four hours of claptrap, so uneven that you pause to wonder what’s happened to the creative standards at “Masterpiece Theatre.” It’s refreshing to turn away from great literature but this is a botched change of pace.

Director Geoffrey Sax can’t salvage the fragmented and labyrinthine script. Nor can he humanize the cheap potshots that the upper-crust protagonist (Havers) levels at “snobbish, class-ridden” England.

There are, however, some lilies that sprout among the weeds, primarily in the last hour, when the best actor in the show--Michael Gough, as a wily, pre-coup KGB reformer--brings the movie its greatest sense of topicality: “Capitalism may well be doomed,” he says, “but it’s our system that will fall apart first.”