It isn’t until the last minute of the first episode of BBC America’s latest drama that many viewers will suddenly get why the show is called Undercover.
They also may realize at that moment that the subsequent five episodes of Undercover, which launches Wednesday at 8 p.m. ET, may take a very different path from where it seemed to be heading.
The first hour focuses on Maya Cobbina (Sophie Okonedo, top), a British lawyer who for 20 years has been battling to save a man wrongfully convicted of murder.
Rudy Jones (Dennis Haysbert, right) is an American, and when we join the story, he is on Death Row in Louisiana, two hours from a lethal injection.
Maya, an activist who has poured her life into this case, is so shaken by its apparent outcome that at the moment Jones is to be given the injection, she walks into a deserted field and has a sympathy seizure, replicating death throes.
Then, however, she’s tracked down by a frantic policeman, telling her the execution was botched. Maya flies into a screaming rage, demanding that Jones be unhooked and taken to a hospital for treatment.
He is and she returns to London, where she has a rather different and seemingly less intense life. While she’s still a defense attorney, she lives a seemingly normal domestic life with her adoring husband Nick Johnson (Adrian Lester, top) and their three surprisingly well-mannered and attentive teenage children.
Two things do happen, however, after she gets home.
First, she’s pressed to become the director of public prosecutions, which would put her on the other side of the courtroom from the defense table for the first time in her career.
Second, Nick has a seemingly random visit from a man who says he found Nick’s dog wandering loose.
The significance of these events doesn’t necessarily fall in the order the viewer might suspect.
Keeping the Jones case alive – and keeping Jones alive – clearly has deep emotional resonance for Maya, and ironically, it helps push her toward accepting the prosecution job. Turns out the next prosecutor may have a new witness in a cold case that has haunted her for 30 years.
The random man, meanwhile, isn’t random. He’s an old acquaintance of Nick’s, and he’s come to call in a card Nick played 20 years earlier when he married Maya.
Nick tries to brush him off and send him away, which we know isn’t happening. We also know the fallout for Maya, and probably the family, will be devastating.
Undercover builds its tension at a deliberate pace. It allows Maya plenty of time to vent her outrage and sorrow over the Jones case, for instance, while hinting that the activists who have rallied around him have become a different sort of family for her.
Subsequent episodes spend considerable time on larger legal and moral questions, like who are bad guys and who are good guys and why.
Okonedo is terrific through all this, and Lester captures Nick’s inner conflict. Tamara Lawrence, Daniel Ezra and Shannon Hayes are solid as the children, and Derek Riddle gives dimension to the non-mystery man.
Written by Peter Moffat and directed by James Hawes, Undercover has an ambitious agenda. It slides the legal and justice systems into moral gray areas, with no simple way out.
Light drama it’s not, good drama it is.