Fears turned into thrills

In the first four hours of “The Grid,” an involving new limited series from TNT and the BBC concerning terrorism and the men and women who counter it, I was only twice driven to talk to the screen: first, when one character invited another to a Eugene O’Neill play for “entertainment” (though perhaps this is just to show the weakness of his dating skills), and later when two men plotting explosive mayhem sat in the well-lighted picture window of a home they have borrowed in order to meet secretly -- just so the camera could pull back from them for dramatic effect. The rest of the time I kept my mouth shut and watched.

We have long looked to current events for the villains of our popular fictions. In the Depression, it was the rich; in World War II, the Germans and Japanese; after that, we had the Russians, and when detente came the Russians gave way to freelance criminal masterminds whose plans for world domination were not ideological but economic. (And there are always aliens.) Our present fears found their locus on Sept. 11, 2001 -- the not dissimilar previous events of Oklahoma City having not quite caught the public imagination -- in that largely misunderstood mosaic of agendas, ethnicities and beliefs we lazily compress under the headings Middle East, Arab and Islam.

It’s the very amorphousness of the current “war” that makes it a difficult subject for TV melodrama. But “The Grid,” by virtue of dogged research, avoiding certain subjects completely and painting on a large enough canvas to accommodate a multiplicity of views, manages to be a first-class thriller that’s both serious and exciting. It does not overplay piety or politics (“Your bosses’ cowboy tactics” is as much of a reference as is made to the current administration) but focuses on (and sides with) the spies, and on the practical matters of their working days and nights. (With a little sex.) It weaves many threads and keeps a dozen balls in the air -- even secondary characters, and there are a Dickensian lot of them, are vividly imagined -- and though its structure is necessarily schematic, the finished product feels more than usually organic.

The spies in question are a crack team of counter-terrorists from Britain’s MI5 and MI6 and our own FBI and CIA, convened by NSC hotshot Julianna Margulies, to operate outside of the box, without territorial jealousies (embodied here by CIA counter-terrorism chief Tom Skerritt). Dylan McDermott is the G-man for whom it’s all personal (he lost his best friend in the Twin Towers, and he’s dating his widow and acting as a father to his son); Raza Michaels is the CIA analyst, Arab American and under constant institutional scrutiny; Jemma Redgrave (niece of Vanessa) is the MI6 operative, a renegade not wholly popular with her peers or superiors; and Bernard Hill (King Theodin in “The Lord of the Rings”) is the man from MI5, tough and crusty and hard to kill.

As for the terrorists, the filmmakers are careful to give them individual reasons for doing what they do, from greed to love of country, and to distinguish their mastermind, a Saudi who goes by the nom de guerre Muhammad (Alki David), from his countryman Osama bin Laden. While Muhammad uses Islamic fundamentalism for his own practical ends, and takes money from Al Qaeda, with whom he has a prickly relationship, his is “a vision for a secular nation.” “First the revolution, my friend,” he says to the idealistic doctor (Silas Carson) he recruits for his organization, “then we’ll let the mullahs and the people decide what the state should be.” As arch villains go, he’s practically Tom Paine.

The script at least glancingly acknowledges that some of the problems of the Middle East are the work of the West. (McDermott’s character is reading T.E. Lawrence’s “Seven Pillars of Wisdom” -- “great powers jockeying for power in the Middle East,” he says. “Nothing’s changed.”) And yet, for all that it strives for balance and shades of gray -- one of the terrorists (Barna Moricz) is a blond, blue-eyed Chechen American -- the film does ultimately boil down to a case of bad guys and good guys: the ones trying to blow things up versus the ones trying to keep them from doing it.

Filmed in Toronto, London and Morocco, “The Grid” registers as authentically global, and the camerawork has a documentary quality. But it is certainly not real. Though Margulies’ team makes sometimes deadly mistakes, they are, dramatically speaking, superagents: sexy, good-looking, well-dressed, professionally styled and out on their own. This is all fine, as are the soap operatics between McDermott and his girlfriend, hot sex between Margulies and her somewhat corrupt energy-consultant boyfriend (James Remar), and heavy flirting between Redgrave and Michaels.

“The Grid” is not “Frontline.” It’s a thriller; its job is to make you care about made-up individuals in orchestrated extremis, to bite your lip and sweat a little -- to draw you out of the real world by playing on your real-world concerns. If it makes you think a little in the bargain, good.

*

‘The Grid’

Where: TNT

When: Premieres 9 to 11 tonight; repeats at 11 p.m.

Rating: The network has rated the miniseries TV-14LSV (may not be suitable for children younger than 14, with advisories for coarse language, sex and violence).

Dylan McDermott...Mike Canary

Julianna Margulies...Maya Jackson

Jemma Redgrave...Emily Tuthill

Alki David...Muhammad

Piter Marek...Raza Michaels

Executive producers Tracey Alexander and Ken Friedman. Director Mikael Salomon. Writers Tracey Alexander and Ken Friedman.