FLEMING Miniseries Hopes To Tide Us Over Until BOND 24

The Summer After Bond is traditionally a dark time for 007 fans: the afterglow has faded, the Blu-rays have been bought, and the film itself has been talked to death and picked apart and wrung through the backlash machinery. It's over! The Bond fan must now wait. Wait for news and rumors and tabloid leaks to start percolating. During this stretch we need something to chew on.

The UK's Sky Atlantic HD channel seems to know this, as they roll out the trailer for their upcoming miniseries Fleming. Told in four parts, this promises to be the most thorough biopic of Bond's creator yet (it's preceded by several TV specials and a limp effort starring Sean Connery's son Jason as Ian Fleming). Fleming promises to delve into the writer's WWII intelligence career and beyond.  As part of the team behind such counter-espionage missions as Operation Mincemeat, his imagination was clearly an asset to the British Naval Intelligence, but Ian Fleming was in reality more of a desk jockey and didn't see a whole lot of action. As such, the teaser above has one wondering if there's a gripping home invasion sequence in the miniseries.

Dominic Cooper (Iron Man 2) is an interesting choice to play the author; there's no physical resemblance to Fleming (you'd have to get the Geoffrey Rush of around 1990 for that), nor does Cooper carry that air of upper-crust stuffiness Fleming seemed to carry so proudly. I guess they want to make him likeable or something. Or maybe he really nails the drunken kink!

The real question this project prompts is: what happened to the bio Duncan Jones was supposedly working on? That really seemed like something worth getting excited about. Fleming premieres this fall on Sky Atlantic; Brit pals, let me know when it might be airing stateside.