TNT miniseries shadows CIA through Cold War

0 Comments | USA TODAY, May, 2007 | by Bill Keveney; Edna Gundersen; Jim Cheng

Television

The CIA will get the epic treatment in TNT's The Company, a six-hour miniseries coming in August that follows the agency from its early years to the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991.

In two-hour installments on three consecutive Sundays, The Company will move from early CIA-KGB chess games in Berlin to the 1956 Hungarian Revolution and 1961's Bay of Pigs fiasco to the search for a KGB mole. Each will take a different form: espionage, action and psychological thriller.

Chris O'Donnell, who plays an idealistic Yale grad recruited into the spy agency, relied on Robert Littell's historical novel of the same name to get a feel for the Cold War era.

"The miniseries is a great format, especially with a 950-page book," O'Donnell says....