As she demonstrated with Prime Suspect, Linda La Plante has a fantastic ear for the grit and swing of police talk. Her scripts for The Commander capture the slippery way that the bond of police work leads to helping each other escape punishment for illegal acts. Commander Clare Blake (Amanda Burton, Silent Witness) has risen to a high position in Scotland Yard, but when she makes some questionable choices, her career threatens to unravel completely, leading to compromises, panic attacks, morphine, infidelity, manipulation, and unscrupulous deals with corrupt officers she'd intended to put away. At first, her reckless behavior seems to require an excessive suspension of disbelief (it doesn't ruin anything to say that she gets sexually involved with a murder suspect), and only the sharp dialogue and committed performances keep you from giving up on the plot. But over the course of additional episodes, Blake's actions grow increasingly seedy--and increasingly entertaining. She never becomes cartoonishly lurid, yet her behavior grows more and more indefensible--it's due to Burton's intriguing combination of sensuality and ambition that the character remains compulsively watchable. Each two- to three-part episode tracks a stand-alone story (a hacker is killing hospital patients by changing their records; a relentless internal investigator--the excellent David Patrick O'Hara, The Departed--forces Blake to join forces with a loathed enemy; an escaped mental patient seems to have murdered Blake's goddaughter), while the investigation of an old cover-up recurs across several episodes. Only the British can come up with a police show that's this smart, gritty, and trashy. Extras include interviews with La Plante, Burton, and the great supporting cast. --Bret Fetzer