TV Review: Classy British actor out of his comfort zone in clunky FBI drama

Rufus Sewell and Marley Shelton star in Eleventh Hour.

About 15 years ago, British actor Rufus Sewell played Seth Starkadder in the period comedy film Cold Comfort Farm. Seth was a handsome devil, a womanising farm hand with ambitions to go to Hollywood and become a movie star. Seth's dreams came true - but Sewell, a good, intelligent actor, has tended to work more in his homeland than the other side of the Atlantic. But now, in the footsteps of actors like Hugh Laurie and Tim Roth, both playing leads in American series, Sewell has bowed to temptation and taken on the role of Dr Jacob Hood, special science adviser to the FBI in Eleventh Hour, a new Jerry Bruckheimer series that started last night (TV One, 8.30).

Sewell is surely the best thing about this bog-standard, credibility-challenged drama. For a start, he speaks clearly. Last night's Seattle-set episode opened with a police car chasing another car driven by a guy flinging 19 canisters out of the window before he crashed. The dialogue for the first few minutes was incomprehensible, an annoying mix of shouting and mumbling.

Then, unbelievably, the pursuing cop opened one of the toxic-looking canisters, showing a clear lack of procedural caution. What was going on? The viewer had to have it spelt out by Hood: all 19 canisters contained fetuses which were all identical - cloned. Hood seemed to deduce this by empathy as he appears to have a remote relationship with scientific equipment.

As with so many American cop shows, Hood has a tough female sidekick, a blonde cop called Rachel Young, assigned to watch over him. Or, as she put it in one of many clunky lines: "He spends most of his time in his head, so I have to protect his back." To Sewell's credit, he looked mildly amused - or was that bemused? - through most of the episode.

Cut to Kelly, a heavily pregnant woman in the supermarket with her young son. Her abusive ex-partner pushed her around and nodded to her swollen belly, accusing her of having been "busy". It turned out she was carrying a surrogate child, implanted by a pair of shifty doctors operating from a travelling clinic. Kelly was doing it for the money but was in a lot of pain. Link back to the 19 canisters and the fate of their cloned contents. She was in danger.

Meanwhile, the police were questioning the driver who had chucked out the canisters. Hood had more success when he dragged him into a church and made him "confess" a name - Geppetto. Which happens to be the name of Pinocchio's "father" - the puppeteer who created his own child. Brilliant!

They quickly tracked down "Geppetto", a rich man trying to replace his dead son, Gabriel. "Gabriel's soul is more than the sum of its constituent parts," intoned Hood. The dialogue was priceless, actually: "in science a negative result is just as important as a positive one"; "to clone anything takes science stroked gently with an artistic hand".

After a series of leaps across plot holes, coincidences and "scientific" deductions, Hood and Young tracked down a near-lifeless Kelly, who had lost her cloned baby. Towards the end, the (presumably) mad female doctor stuck scissors into the neck of Kelly's ex, jabbed a syringe in her colleague's neck and tried to do the same to Young. And then she got away. How untidy.

I hope Sewell enjoyed working on this badly written, muddled fluff while it lasted. The series was cancelled after 18 episodes.