Paul Casserly: Undercover spooks

Keri Russell and Matthew Rhys in The Americans.

Wigs. There was a time in New Zealand TV when wigs ruled.

I recently watched a DVD of the excellent 1980s NZ comedy series Funny Business and marveled at the range of fake hair being pressed into service. The same wigs have no doubt been worn by other Kiwi actors throughout the years. A Bruno Lawernce here, a Rima Te Waita there. They may still be somewhere in a box at TVNZ along with Little Ted and Manu. Comedian Mark Wright, a prolific performer in the 1990s, probably wore all of them. Some have even featured in re-enactments on Crimewatch.

But by the time of Flight Of Conchords, the wig and comedy had somehow parted company.

Wigs still feature in Hollywood, but they are top shelf rugs, attached with all the care of the advanced hair that's glued atop ageing cricketers and Wayne Rooney. No such love for the TV wig, which has to go on quickly and cheaply.

Undercover Boss is the most recent abuser of the bad wig. The wigs on my new favourite show, The Americans, aren't as obvious as on the ones worn by the patronising Undercover Bosses nor are they as seamless as the ones employed on American Hustle. But there are a lot of them.

The Americans is set in cold war suburban USA. A perfect looking couple - she played by Kerry Russell of Felicity fame, he by Welshman Matthew Rhys - are in fact Soviet Spies, buried so deep that even their children don't know. But things are closing in on them, and now even their daughter is getting a little suspicious.

Don't worry if you missed series one, I did too, jumping in as I did just a few days back, I'm already hanging out for episode two. If you fancy the idea of a glossy entertainment that marries the creeping dread of Breaking Bad with the mad pace of Homeland, something of the family dynamics of Big Love, not to mention more than a little Get Smart, then do jump in. There will be blood, 80s cars and lots of wigs.

It probably helps if you are a fan of the cloak and dagger. Let me list a few of my favourites. Forget James Bond, he's more a superhero, although I will allow those awesome Spy vs. Spy cartoons from Mad Magazine, the ultimate cold war animated series created by Cuban exile Antonio Prohías who was once accused of spying by Fidel Castro.

There is also the comedic take of Maxwell Smart on Get Smart, a tremendous show with one of the best title sequences of all time.

On the serious side, I'm not sure if there is anything better than Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, the series, the movie and of course the book. Author John le Carre had the advantage of actually being a spy, for M15 and M16, and so captured perfectly the banality of institutional evil. The opening two minutes of the 1979 TV version just has to be seen. Pure brilliance. On the other hand, Spooks, the British show, had me in its grip for a short time, but it wasn't a lasting affair. If I want flashy, it has to be American.
Homeland, may have lacked the tang of real world espionage, but it was - for the first season at least - a brilliant addition to the genre, a zeitgeist capturing revelation even, but the show has left the reservation to such an extent that it no longer holds my attention. The performance of Claire Danes as Carrie, which was such breath of crazy fresh air to begin with, feels like a bit of chore to sit through now.

Come to think of it I, as much as I loved True Detective I don't think I could stand to watch another season of Matthew McConaughey grimly reciting his apocalyptic verse while fashioning beer cans into nick-nacks. That's the problem with high-octane performances. They burn you out. Basil Fawlty is so fondly remembered in part because there were only ever six episodes at a time, and only 12 in total.

This is not something that The Americans suffers from, which ironically is probably why I turned my nose up at it the first time round. It just looked a bit dull.

Could New Zealand's own history of spying be turned into such dramatic gold? Who do they even spy on anyway? Maori activists? Unionists? Chinese house buyers? We might be better off pursuing a comedy about our secret agents. The GCSB, which has it's own parody twitter feed, @GCSBIntercepts, is an obvious source of mirth, but history has a better story.

It comes from what was then known as the Security Intelligent Service, aka the SIS, and involves an infamous incident in which a briefcase was left on a suburban street by one of its operatives. When opened, by a member of the public, it was found to contain a copy of Penthouse and three cold meat pies. There were also, in a spooky foreshadowing of Kim Dotcom, "notes of a dinner party hosted by a German". Actually, a quick look at the SIS wiki-page reveals an entire series packed full of comedy gold. I wonder if TVNZ still has those wigs?

* The Americans. SoHo, Tuesdays 8.30pm