CI5: The New Professionals is a British television action crime drama series, created and principally written by Brian Clemens, that first broadcast on Sky One on 19 September 1999. Billed as an updated version of the 1970s terrestrial television series The Professionals, the series is set in a fictional government agency known as CI5 (Criminal Intelligence Department 5). The original group of three men - Doyle, Bodie and their boss Cowley - are replaced by a team consisting of Harry Malone (Edward Woodward), Chris Keel (Kal Weber), Sam Curtis (Colin Wells) and Tina Backus (Lexa Doig). In a similar manner to The Professionals, the series included a number of high-budget impressive action sequences, often filmed in a James Bond-esque style.
An initial thirteen episode series was offered to all major British broadcasters. At one time, it was suggested that ITV would broadcast the series, but after attempting to secure a cheaper deal for broadcast rights, producer David Wickes told The Daily Mail that he "would sooner lock it away in a vault than hand it over to ITV for next to nothing." Sky chose to invest in the series, after considerable editing which removed a number of sequences deemed "excessively violent or disturbing".
Sky provided the show with considerable pre-publicity, but viewer response to the show was extremely poor, with the low production values and perceived low-quality acting being widely mocked among those who watched it. The inevitable comparisons to the original series were uniformly negative, also the series was not a success in the ratings. The series was repeated on Sky One in December 2000. the series was not repeated on any other satellite television channel until 2012. The series, in its original, uncut form, was eventually released on Region 2 DVD on 8 August 2016.
Source: Wikipedia (CC BY-SA)
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