A hit in England and now streaming on Peacock, the six-part Channel 4/Peacock coproduction “The Undeclared War” will likely find a smaller fan base here, especially younger ones (it’s rated TV-MA but the sexual and verbal content is aggressively discreet). It’s a frustrating watch, never crass or sloppy, but underpowered.
It works from a scarily realistic two-years-from-now scenario: In the run-up to Britain’s 2024 elections, Russia wages a wily cyberattack and unleashes a brilliantly destructive bit of malware, hiding inside reams of code. In writer-director Peter Kosminsky’s series, Hannah Khalique-Brown plays the 21-year-old Saara, a coding expert whose first day on the job as a university intern at Government Communications Headquarters coincides with the very day of the cyberterrorist attack.
Simon Pegg exhales nervously as Saara’s sympathetic boss; Adrian Lester takes the role of the conservative prime minister, who has trigger-happy advisers in his ear; Mark Rylance, who teamed up with Kosminsky on the Tudor-set “Wolf Hall,” portrays an eccentric GCHQ employee who mentors Saara in the gentle art of code-whispering.
