4 out of 5

Creator: Ian Mackintosh

I checked out Sandbaggers after reading that writer Greg Rucka’s comic Queen & Country used it as an influence.  I can’t help but feel this gave me an edge on viewing, as this tightly focused series on Neil Burnside – Director of Operations for SIS (the UKs CIA) – tasks his most prized operatives, the Sandbaggers, on top-secret for-your-eyes-only topple-nations missions – burying the viewer in jargon and SIS structure and politics from the get-go, which Q&C had already trained me on some years ago.  A new viewer, watching the series with me, felt a little blustered by the cold approach.  Was this part of what made it so appealing?  The sort of reward, and effort involved in getting into the world?  Or is it part of its whip-smart writing that simply doesn’t pander to an audience, presenting these events how they maybe, probably play out in real life – huge skirmishes over minor misunderstandings, crises averted with a signed document or a handshake.  It’s all part of the package.  There’s no music (except an awesome opening theme), and the ever calculating Neil, a believably balanced presentation of a both frail and frightening man by Roy Marsden, along with his operatives, generally show us how this is done from within offices or over lunch breaks, with only the briefest glimpses of action in the field (and considering the low-budget presentation and the UK hillsides subbing as whatever international locale, these sequences are amazingly and tensely executed).  The only thing lacking is a bit of space.  I’m glad this wasn’t modern TV, because it’d be cluttered with subplots and cliffhangers, but sometimes the bittersweet resolutions that pop up in the last five minutes of any episode make you wish for a bit more time or room to explore the issue, and though season 2 better started to followup on the consequences of character’s actions and behaviors, it gets bumpy in season 3 due to series writer Mackintosh disappearing after four eps, leaving a few to fill-in writers who do good but not great jobs.  But it’s a high bar.  As they point out several times in season 1 – this is NOT James Bond.  And sure, it’s fiction.  But if you want to feel like you’re getting a real glimpse of how this spy game might function in real life, after a few terrifically tense eps of Sandbaggers, you’ll feel like you’ve learned some secrets privy only to those fans of the show.