The Singing Detective. Totally brilliant. Although I hear the movie version (which I have yet to see) was rancid.
I can’t believe no one’s mentioned the Inspector Morse series. Or wouldn’t that qualify as a mini-series?
I second Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy and **Smiley’s People **. I have both series on DVD and watch them every six months or so.
The Grid and Traffic are two good recent miniseries. The first one deals with terrorism and the second with drugs.
Taken and Band of Brothers are good too.
Three good series which probably didn’t find their way to the US were The Beiderbecke Affair , The Beiderbecke Connection and The Beiderbecke Tapes. They were comedy dramas , set in the north of England and starred Barbara Flynn and James Bolam. Full of witty, clever dialogue all three were written by Alan Plater. An added bonus was a cracking jazz score played by Kenny Baker and his band. For those Brits who are interested, they are being broadcast again on ITV3, starting last week.
I loved North and South. I don’t know if it is the best ever, but I have watched it over and over again and loved it each time.
Band of Brothers is by far the best mini-series I’ve seen.
I have that on tape.
N&S II was not as good, and N&S III was terrible. They’d wandered so far away from the books, they had to whip up some last minute plot devices to get back on track.
I was absolutely riveted by North and South. While all my friends were drooling over Patrick Swayze, I had James Read all to myself. And it was more than just hot guys, the story was so great. I remember after it was over I borrowed the novel from the library. Oy, that was hard for a 13 year old girl to read!
Of course, The Stand is also one of my favorites. The only thing they got wrong was Harold. Parker Lewis is way to hot to pretend to be some loser.
I thought James Bolam died after The Likely Lads and then I thought he died after When The Boat Comes In and now you tell me he lives again.
I bought a retrospective about The Likely Lads for my parents last year.
The Beiderbecke trilogy was made in the 80’s but even so James Bolem is still around and appears in many TV productions. His latest was a BBC series about a doctor father and son partnership set in the 50’s. Bolem has had a much more successful career than Rodney Bewes (his fellow star on Likely Lads) in fact after that series Bewes virtually disappeared from sight.
Here is James Bolem’s biog
I just saw Love For Lydia on DVD, which really hooks you. It’s been years since I’ve seen Flambards but I wanted to add another vote for it.
I’m also a big fan of both Pride and Prejudice versions—the 1995 BBC/A&E one, and the 1980 BBC/Masterpiece Theatre one. Both are good in their own way. The 1980 seems to follow the book more closely, but a lot of people don’t like Darcy because he was such a cold fish compared to Colin Firth’s Darcy. I liked the 1980 Darcy [David Rintoul] because he you really did hate him at the start of the series, and then gradually grew to like him by the end.
I also liked Captains and the Kings and The Stand. And I even liked The Langoliers—it made sense enough to me, though it did drag a bit.
yosemite, If you’re a fan of BBC costume dramas ,you might like to know that that they recently dramatised North and South. This is not the series of the same name discussed earlier on the thread but is taken from the novel by the Victorian writer Mrs. Elizabeth Gaskell. I notice that is out on DVD but I don’t know if it has reached the American TV networks yet.
This Link gives all the details.