The Looming Tower, BBC2
★★★★★
If you were searching for something to fill the desperate Saturday-night void between Britain’s Got Talent ending and Match Of The Day beginning, you could have done worse than head to BBC iPlayer to check out this classy 9/11 drama.
Based on Lawrence Wright’s Pulitzer-prize winning book, this 10-parter starring Jeff Daniels and Pete Sarsgaard is not so much how 9/11 happened, more how the CIA and FBI failed to prevent it.
It had me hooked from the thrilling opening scene, which detailed a US raid on an al-Qaeda cell, to the closing scene, in which FBI anti-terrorism chief John O’Neill (Daniels) delivered a chilling and portentous three word response to news that al-Qaeda had stepped up its operations by targeting US embassies in Africa: “Now it begins.”
9/11 story told in The Looming Tower is scarier because it's true, says Sara Wallis
Annoyingly, now it has begun you’ll have to wait until next Saturday to find out what happens next - unless you fork out for the DVD or stream it on Amazon Prime Video.
It should be worth the wait.
This is top-quality drama, with powerful performances from Daniels and Sarsgaard, who plays O’Neill’s CIA adversary Martin Schmidt.
Essentially it’s Homeland before Homeland went a bit loopy.
The opening episode also made much of the fact that the public and the news networks were more interested in President Bill Clinton’s sleazy shenanigans than in what was happening in the rest of the world.
Just in case you were looking for parallels with what’s happing in modern-day America...
