I just discovered "The Sandbaggers" on DVD recently. It's a British show from the late '70s or early '80s, about an elite British intelligence unit.

Most of it takes place in the agency's office, which is shot on video on a set that looks like it was built with a budget slightly higher than a high school play. Intermittently the show shifts to location shooting on film, sometimes with scenes of pretty intense violence.

That often jarring visual transition kind of mirrors what's striking about the show thematically. Like "The Wire," the main subject of the show is the institution, so much of "The Sandbaggers" consists of the head of the unit arguing with various people, and the Sandbaggers themselves do a lot of sitting around, waiting for something to happen. Then all of a sudden in the next scene they're sneaking across the Finnish/Russian border and dodging Soviet troops.

It took me a while to put my finger on something else that's really jarring abut the show, but I think it's that it takes place in a world where the Cold War is just sort of taken for granted, a fact of life. There's a lot of plotting about who to kill to obtain some plans or maps or whatever, but very little discussion about why they need to get those things in the first place. I have no idea how "realistic" the show is, but this nonchalance about basically subverting democracy and international law on a regular basis feels true to this moment, even if all the Cold War stuff, seen today, makes you sometimes think "Wait--why are all these people spying on each other, again?"

Anyway, I've never really seen anything like it. It's both one of the darkest and wordiest shows I've ever seen. And it has awesome theme music.

I guess the series was cut short because the creator, who was rumored to have intelligence ties himself, vanished while flying a small plane in Canada.

i absolutely worship this television series. oh god. i wish there were seven more seasons of this, and three more installments in the alec guinness tinker, tailor, soldier, spy franchise.

don't we call things like that 'franchises' these days?