The State Within

The State Within is a 2006 six-hour British television political drama serial, written by Lizzie Mickery and Daniel Percival, produced by Grainne Marmion as a joint BBC–BBC America production, that was broadcast by BBC One in the United Kingdom from Thursday, 2 November 2006.

It was originally broadcast and released on DVD as six 1-hour episodes. It was subsequently released on Netflix in the UK and USA in seven 50-minute episodes.

Story

The protagonist of The State Within is Sir Mark Brydon (Jason Isaacs), the British Ambassador to Washington at the centre of a political conspiracy threatening to depose Western governments. As such, he must prevent a war, while facing a personal dilemma. Lynne Warner (Sharon Gless) is the United States Secretary of Defense, Nicholas Brocklehurst (Ben Daniels) is nominally the British Counsellor External Affairs, but is a Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) agent assigned to embassy duty, and James Sinclair (Alex Jennings) is the former British ambassador to the fictional former Soviet republic of Tyrgyzstan (cf. Kyrgyzstan). This character resembles Craig Murray, the womanizing British ambassador who exposed British and American complicity in torture and human rights abuses in Uzbekistan.