David Wolstencroft moved from London to Los Angeles in November, and not only so he could rise each morning for a game of tennis--though there is that, and that might have been good enough. He made the trip, which is thus far temporary but may well prove permanent, for the same reason offered by the other 83.3 percent who light out for the Western territories: to find work in the dream factory, where entertainment is mass-manufactured. Unlike most who make the journey, Wolstencroft does not arrive with a blank résumé and an empty suitcase; indeed, he landed on these shores, pulled from his valise a novel about espionage and sold it before he'd recovered from jet lag. He has also made television shows in England, where they have been well-received and much honored. But over here, all that means is when he meets with network executives, they treat him very much like a child who's made a finger-painting for the refrigerator--a little pat on the head, a little how lovely for you, not much more.

"I had a meeting with the production company of a network yesterday," Wolstencroft says. "There was a lot of head-nodding, a sense of, 'Yeah, great, well done. Oh, you're number one in Turkistan? That's brilliant. You have a very successful Iranian game show? That's great for you.' Nothing outside of federal land seems to matter." He pauses. "You could argue that Britain is federal land, but anyway."

That condescension will evaporate soon enough. Wolstencroft's series for the BBC, an hour-long espionage drama titled Spooks in the U.K. and sensitively retitled MI-5 for rebroadcast on the A&E Network in the States, ought to move him from the kiddie desk to the adult table in short order. Though it airs in the cable-station suburbs, far from the network's densely populated high-rise neighborhood, MI-5 has attracted enough attention--billboards around L.A., two flattering pieces in The New York Times--for Wolstencroft to consider it a success before it aired a single episode. (It debuted on A&E on July 22 and airs Tuesdays at 9 p.m. Central.)

At first glance, MI-5, about the day-to-day dealings of the British intelligence agency, looks very much like an American show. Its split screens will comfort those needing a 25th hour of 24; its spy games and tech talk will delight those who watch Alias for reasons other than Jennifer Garner; its walk-and-talk scenes will appease those who find The West Wing not chatty enough; its resolutions at the end of each episode will satisfy those who watch Law & Order for the unhappy ending. And it's populated by the young and the restless, good-looking and ethnically diverse characters who might be right at home brewing laugh-track chitchat in a sitcom coffee shop. There's Tom Quinn (Matthew Macfayden), a John Cusack-Clive Owen hybrid for whom the job has become a hindrance on his burgeoning personal life; Zoe Reynolds (Keeley Hawes), the spy with binoculars everyone else is staring at; and Danny Hunter (David Oyelowo), who uses his technical prowess to raise his credit limit and keep in high fashion. Their superiors, Harry Pearce (Peter Firth) and Tessa Phillips (Jenny Agutter of Logan's Run), are accordingly cantankerous and compassionate.

But merely to compare it to its Yank counterparts does MI-5 no justice at all. It's far better--"startlingly, embarrassingly" so, to quote the very kind Times--than the likes of The Agency or Alias or even 24 and every other hour-long drama on the major American networks. Granted, that says little at a time when every other scripted show is a C.S.I. or Law & Order or J.A.G. spin-off or knock-off, but MI-5 does not deserve to be lumped in with the shows to which it bears a facile resemblance.

It's too clever, too sophisticated and too human for that--a show about people who live (and, in one shocking instance in the second episode, die) for their job, which happens to be protecting the citizenry of Mother England from the likes of American anti-abortion terrorists, race-baiting politicians, Turkish extremists and even their own fallen agents. There are copious references to al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden, but it's not merely a series in which brown-faced baddies mean to do Britain ill. The series is as much about Tom's fragile affair with a single mother and her young daughter, from whom he keeps too many secrets, as it is the agency's attempts to keep President Bush out of harm's way when German anarchists threaten his visit.

"I showed a friend of mine the second episode when I first came out here, someone I really respect," Wolstencroft says. "And he just sort of sat back and said, 'That has more story in an hour than in an entire season of some American drama that I've seen.'"