The Islamic extremists in "Sleeper Cell," a 10-hour miniseries beginning Sunday on Showtime, are first-generation jihadis, an it-takes-a-village collection of holy warriors practicing and plotting potential strikes on L.A. targets.
They include an impressionable white kid from Berkeley, a Frenchman and former skinhead, a Bosnian Muslim, a Saudi national, and an African American ex-con. They're supposed to be woven into the fabric of the city, dormant terrorists with jobs and lives masking the ultimate mission.
The creators of "Sleeper Cell," Ethan Reiff and Cyrus Voris ("Bulletproof Monk"), want to paint the issue in all stripes and sentiments while getting at an airborne anxiety -- extremism in our midst, a war with no front. It's a lot of noise around -- dare I say it -- a procedural; "Sleeper Cell" seems to devolve into a long, suspenseful caper pitting the feds against a band of twisted criminals, one of whom is working undercover for the FBI.
For all its putative complexity, then, its passing examination of radical Islam versus peaceable Islam, its allusions to Guantanamo Bay and the Iraq insurgency, "Sleeper Cell" feels more like "The Shield," the L.A.-based cop drama on FX, the characters talking in overly stylized, expository quips, the L.A. cityscape whipping past in convincing fashion.
The subterfuge starts at a temple before moving to a bowling alley, in and out of vans, over to the mosque, across the border to Tijuana and into the arms of a lonely single mother; "Sleeper Cell" can be gruesomely violent, and the producers manage to shoehorn in sex scenes.
Showtime, trying to nip at HBO's brand, keeps conjuring promising and topical micro worlds, shooting premises into the zeitgeist as if out of a cannon, only to see them drift to the ground in the middle distance. It seems to start with ideas and then work backward, toward formula. The network is launching "Sleeper Cell" during a "free preview weekend" window. The packaging is all there, a DVD that came to critics as a discreet folder with the tagline: "Friends. Neighbors. Husbands. Terrorists." You opened it up to a picture of five guys standing around a barbecue -- friends, you figured, whom you would come to know and empathize with despite their horrific errand.
