1956. The Cold War is raging and the BBC has grown stale and stagnant in its programming. That will change with ‘The Hour,’ a 60-minute live news program that will tackle the issues of the day. But when events in Egypt and murderous machinations at home start colliding one into the other, reporter Freddie Lyon (Ben Whishaw), producer Bel Rowley (Romola Garai) and host Hector Madden (Dominic West) find themselves at odds at the best way to package it for public consumption, political leaders and corporate handlers at the BBC going out of their way to try and shift the content of the program in a way that promotes their own nefarious agendas.

CRITIQUE

I am certifiably head over heels for The Hour. This six-episode program is one of the best shows I’ve seen in ages, all 344 minutes of it so hypnotic I couldn’t turn my head away for a single solitary second. Creator and writer Abi Morgan had crafted a fascinating piece of historical fiction that is as thrilling and it is educational, the labyrinthine mystery at its core a profoundly beguiling who-done-it that’s one part Agatha Christie and two parts John le Carré.

There’s plenty to be said but I’m going to keep this short and sweet. The acting is universally excellent, the three leads delivering fascinating performances that never quite go where you expect them to. The supporting work is also quite fine, Anna Chancellor, Juliet Stevenson, Tim Pigott-Smith and especially Anton Lesser making indelible imprints. I loved how witty the show was, how its humor felt ingrained into the material and not some extraneous piece of it.

Most of all, though, I loved the way fact and fiction collide, how what might have happened behind the scenes of the Suez Canal crisis is given a fanciful going over and transformed into the kind of Machiavellian political whirligig that fits right into today’s current economic and war-weary maelstroms. The show is fresh and inspired, playing as a procedural yet having the bracing immediacy of a Jason Bourne thriller. It is, in short, amazing, and I personally can’t wait to watch it again and hope beyond hope the BBC picks it up for a second season.

THE VIDEO

The Hour is presented on two dual-layer 50GB Blu-rays with a 1080i 1.78:1 transfer.

THE AUDIO

The six episode program comes to Blu-ray in English 2.0 LCPM and includes optional English SDH subtitles.

EXTRAS

Extras here include:

·         Creating ‘The Hour’ (20 minutes)

·         Behind the Scenes of ‘The Hour’ (10 minutes)

Both are rather average, yet I still personally enjoyed both EPK-style featurettes all th same. Creating ‘The Hour’ is the obvious standout, but the behind-the-scenes short still offer up plenty of interest.

FINAL THOUGHTS

While audio is only average, and while video is solid (if not quite what it could be), The Hour is such an amazing bit of BBC programming the two-disc set’s technical shortcoming are nowhere near the problem they might potentially have been and the show been anything close to average. I couldn’t recommend giving this six-episode show a look more strenuously, and to say I loved it would be a massive understatement.