37 Days

Produced by the BBC as part of the World War I centennial, this three-episode drama traces the chain of political events that began with the assassination of Austria's Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo on June 28, 1914 and concluded with the declaration of war between the United Kingdom and Germany 37 days later. (Austria declared war on Serbia a month after the assassination, but the emphasis here is on the events that propelled the British into the conflict.) The drama unfolds as an intellectual thriller and political tragedy, with an array of diplomats and government ministers engaging in endless calculations and machinations that will ultimately lead to the sadly misnamed “war to end all wars.” In London, Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey (Ian McDiarmid) and Prime Minister H.H. Asquith (Tim Pigott-Smith) confront a crisis that seems beyond their capacity to quell, while in Berlin, the Kaiser (Rainer Sellien) is carefully driven towards aggression by his military advisers, oblivious to what peril a prolonged conflict would bring to his empire. Ultimately, there are no heroes or villains here—although a young Winston Churchill (well played by Nicholas Asbury) comes across as a boorish warmonger. If one can overlook the dramatic device of having the series narrated by a pair of young government clerks, one British and one German, the handsomely-produced 37 Days offers a mature treatment of how an entirely avoidable tragedy was fast-tracked into the first great global conflict. Highly recommended. (P. Hall)