The Times, November 21, 1988, by William Holmes
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A slick, exploitative special, *The Zero Option* (ITV) 
exploited every cliche in the book of recent terrorist 
scenarios, without any psychological penetration but with a 
good deal of glitz: it looked like a giant up-beat to yet 
another *Professionals*/*Sweeney*/*Dempsey & Makepeace*.

It launched a new dynamic duo, of whom the main hero is a 
gritty, over-eager SAS man who is made to take the rap for a 
bungled rescue in which three kidnapped children are killed. 
Should he retire to the land and run his father-in-law's 
estate? It seems unlikely, as he has that lean and hungry 
look, so he goes in with a shady freelance security firm and 
is assigned to solve a mystery airplane hijacking in which a 
few million pounds of diamonds have gone missing.

The story was full of up-market settings--sinister late-
night discussions in modern art galleries--and trendy 
violence. But apart from an entirely ludicrous final shoot-
out on an airfield, where the diamonds turned up "just like 
on the movies," it carried its own weary sub-realist 
conviction, and had all the signs of a successful peak-time 
series in the making. [...]



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