"You need the patience of a saint for counterintelligence," cautions Michael Keaton, playing the iciest and creepiest Cold Warrior the CIA may have ever produced.

Thankfully, TNT's The Company requires no such discipline. Unlike last winter's sluggish and similarly themed movie The Good Shepherd, this darkly engrossing and quietly suspenseful six-hour miniseries (airing over three Sundays, Aug. 5, Aug. 12 and Aug. 19) packages its chilly, cynical overview of international Cold War espionage in a brisk parade of sumptuously produced historical set pieces.

From the sinister back alleys of '50s Berlin to the crushed Hungarian student uprising of 1956 and the calamitous Bay of Pigs invasion of 1961, we witness the history of the spy game through the eyes of idealistic CIA recruit Jack McAuliffe. He's played by Chris O'Donnell, whose blandly handsome boyishness is the perfect canvas on which to project a slowly dawning disillusion.

Jack's murky circle includes the reptilian (and mesmerizing) Keaton as an obsessively paranoid spymaster continually warning of a "wilderness of mirrors"; Alfred Molina as a colorfully cantankerous mentor; and CSI: Miami's Rory Cochrane and Alessandro Nivola as Jack's Yale chums, who end up on opposite sides of the Iron Curtain divide. Unless one — or both — are lying.

Everyone in The Company (based on Robert Littell's novel) is playing a delicate, lethal game of disinformation and betrayal, where trust is rare and love almost inevitably becomes a casualty. Watching this web of deceit unfold, leaving no one unscathed, reminds you of how absorbing and satisfying the epic miniseries used to be in its glory days.

The Company airs Sundays, Aug. 5 to Aug. 19, 8 pm/ET, on TNT.

There's something refreshing, up to a point, about an action hero as unburdened by existential torment as the new but not-quite-improved Flash Gordon. "Just keep smiling," says wholesome everyguy Flash (Smallville's Eric Johnson) after he's been taken captive with ex-girlfriend Dale Arden (Gina Holden) on an alien planet at the other end of a dimensional rift.

This contemporary remake is cheerfully B-movie cheesy — watch an alien attack a bowling alley — but also stubbornly flat, settling for cute when sublime camp would be preferred. The drabness extends to supposedly merciless dictator Ming of Mongo (John Ralston), whom Flash encounters on his quest to learn what happened to his presumed-dead scientist father. This Ming is about as exotic and menacing as a country-club despot. What this Flash sorely needs is a little panache.

Flash Gordon airs Fridays, 9 pm/ET, on Sci fi Channel.