‘After the War’: Personal Battles in Peacetime Britain

It runs 10 hours but ends too quickly.

“After the War”--the new arrival on Sunday’s “Masterpiece Theatre”--is that captivating, a simply stunning effort from Britain’s Granada Television and the strongest candidate yet for miniseries of the season.

Americans may have had it with long miniseries, but happily not the British, who remain state-of-the-art when it comes to these extended dramas, many of which have constituted some of the best television of the last 20 years.

Here is one that can make your evening. Sexy, brilliant and unsettling, its eight segments (including two that run two hours) air at 9 p.m. Sundays on Channels 28 and 15 and at 8 p.m. on Channels 50 and 24. Treat time.

This is Frederic Raphael’s urbane and richly charactered reflection of life among the British middle class after World War II--an era that echoed horrors and yet surged with optimism, Raphael says, “a belief that great changes were possible, that freedom and fraternity would replace hostility and tyranny.”

In “After the War,” reality intervenes.

Although British, Raphael’s humanly flawed characters are universal. They crease and bruise. They also succeed and falter, inspire and disappoint, surface and vanish, then reappear. They’re intriguing, especially because they’re open wounds, haunted and defined by their pasts, yet ever evolving as they chart their way through the postwar years, confronted by moral and ethical choices. No exclamation points. When we leave these people, with the Arab-Israeli war of 1967 as a backdrop, they are works in progress, still fighting personal wars and trying to discover themselves.

The premiere actually begins during World War II, in 1942, as young Michael Jordan and Joe Hirsch meet at a prep school in Devon, where they play boys’ games while learning lessons on human behavior they’ll carry into adulthood.

Both are Jewish, but are unalike and have little in common. Michael, the story’s main protagonist, is the son of a prosperous barrister. He will grow up feeling somehow guilty for having been comfortably removed from the atrocities witnessed by Joe, a hardened, driven refugee from Nazism and the son of a carpenter.

The lives of Michael and Joe will interlock for the next 25 years, but it’s their fathers who meet briefly in the second episode, in 1947, when Manfred Hirsch gives Samuel Jordan help in investigating a German banker’s possible links to Nazism.

What a fascinatingly complex and challenging episode this is, beautifully directed by John Madden and wonderfully acted by Anton Rodgers as Samuel Jordan. Plus Jeroen Krabbe just puts you away in a cameo as the German banker whose intellectual pragmatism makes disturbing sense.

The directing for the 10 hours, split among Madden, John Glenister and Nicholas Renton, is outstanding throughout, and with Adrian Lukis leading the way as the adult Michael, “After the War” also delivers one memorable performance after another:

Robert Reynolds as Joe; Clare Higgins as Michael’s sister, Rachel; Serena Gordon as Michael’s wife, Annie Rose; Claire Goodall as an actress who exploits Michael, Denis Quilley and Susannah York as a theater couple and Art Malik as an Algerian doctor.

Meanwhile, as Michael moves from tabloid newspaper writing to playwriting, Joe becomes a ruthless TV mogul and Rachel settles in volatile West Africa with her husband.

Coming late in the series, Rachel’s violent African saga is played out against a seething black nationalism and anti-imperialism that recalls the British empire-bashing of Granada’s earlier “The Jewel in the Crown,” arguably the best miniseries ever. As in “The Jewel in the Crown,” Raphael’s series mingles past and present while refracting global politics through its characters’ personal lives.

War business and show business coexist at a distance. Nothing in “After the War” is darker--or funnier--than its forays into a cynical, yet deliciously wicked theater world. Raphael finds grime beneath the glitter. There’s cruelty and aching melancholy here, but also slashing wit. Meanwhile, as Michael gains success as a writer, he begins to measure his “flip lines” against the reality of the outside world.

“After the War” deserves to eclipse “The Glittering Prizes” as Raphael’s best-known TV work. If there’s a glimmer of weakness here, it’s the dialogue, which ironically is also one of Raphael’s great strengths. At times, his lines are so memorable and incredibly clever that you can’t imagine actual people speaking them. However, that’s a minor failing in overwhelmingly grand television.

Early in the story, Michael’s aloof father teaches him the tango, and they dance together in the dark. It’s a lovely, lingering scene, one of many. In this series, nearly everything dances.