TV REVIEW: UNDERCOVER

Everyone had to learn new rules, including the police.

The decade-long 1960-1970s rage over the Vietnam War splintered a
once-conservative society. Defiance was less a mood than a fashion
statement. Attacking anything the older generation held dear became de
rigueur. The music turned wild. Drugs became the message youth was
taking over.

Only it wasn't. The drug trade may have been a symbol. It quickly
became a business, whisked from the young and the innovators and into
the hands of middle management.

When this writer arrived in San Francisco, attracted by the hippie
movement, the suppliers of vegetative and chemical peace and love were
by then toughly efficient, nattily dressed and sporting good cars and
guns. It didn't take long into the 1970s for this to happen here.

Everyone needed to learn new rules. That included the police, pushed
from the easily managed alcohol culture into fighting a wholly
underground one: marijuana and meth, the early M&Ms.

Any learning curve has wins and losses. Last night's Undercover, the
first episode in a series of three, looks at the people sent into "the
scene". For them the mix of conflicting morality, danger and
relentless concentration became its own petri dish. Some personalities
flowered. Others disintegrated.

Last night's first episode had mostly winners, with us also seeing the
cost of the victories. The robust Tony Bouchier, now a successful
Auckland lawyer, needed a brutal method of deflecting suspicion, one
shown in graphic detail.

Patrick O'Brien, an overachieving Catholic boy from Wellington, was
adrift in the drug culture for four years, dancing at the very edge of
the law: "I think I probably perjured myself every time I gave
evidence." It came out of defence counsel asking if he was stoned when
present at crimes. He claimed he was "simulating", and wasn't.

For him the beginning of the end, and illustrating the confused
morality, was a moment at a beach, and having to make an appalling
decision about saving a life.

His moral equilibrium hadn't been helped by arriving at a town to find
there was almost no drug industry and then all but creating one, to
then arrest everyone involved.

He would come out of the programme when an astute handler realised he
was in too deep, after taking only hours to gain a notorious and
famously suspicious criminal's trust.

Next week's second episode follows the man who almost brought the
whole programme down _ in going from a pre-police Sunday school
teacher to a post-police convicted heroin dealer.

The show loads up with crime on television's more or less obligatory
jittery camerawork, generous use of shadow and close-ups tight enough
to show the sweat emerging from the pores.

The producers also kept abruptly switching the lens filters on the
interview subjects, which was irritating and distracted from what was
being said.

In a sign of the times, the show used a 21st-century metaphor to help
us identify the villainous and the rogue outcasts. They were the ones
smoking the tobacco cigarettes.