NEW YORK: Fleming: The Man Who Would Be Bond begins with a quote from Ian Fleming himself: "Everything I write has a precedent in truth.

"This heavily massaged four-part miniseries about the war years of James Bond's creator, which begins this week on BBC America, seeks to prove that Fleming (played by Dominic Cooper) should be taken at his word.

Fleming, though a disclaimer notes that events have been altered for "dramatic effect," makes the case that Ian Fleming was the proto-Bond, the man who first liked his martini shaken.

This makes for an action-packed, boudoir-filled miniseries that incidentally enervates Fleming's imagination: So thoroughly highlighting an author's kinship with his creation suggests that his fiction is mere autobiography.

But Fleming, who valued excitement in a story as much as anyone, probably would not mind Fleming's implicit diss of his creativity, since the show goes out of its way to make him seem pretty damn swashbuckling.

As the series begins, Fleming is a dashing dilettante and aristocrat with mommy issues, bedding women and making a mess of his work as a financial investor.

He is hired to work for naval intelligence precisely because he has no truck with authority, and he soon puts his raffish nature and creativity to good use in espionage.

The mischief he manages against the Axis powers sounds like James Bond plots (one scheme in particular prefigured Operation Mincemeat) while putting him in proximity to all sorts of Bond regalia: trick pens, high-stakes card games, shootouts.

The phrase "license to kill" is dropped into conversation. Even the trusty M shows up, in the form of a naval assistant named Monday (Anna Chancellor).

But Fleming is not just purely Bond-lite. It's equal parts 007 and Merchant Ivory, a British period romance that takes breaks for explosions.

Cooper has a dark, cocksure swagger, and his libidinous Fleming initially takes up with a loose but well-born sweetheart named Muriel— she goes by Mu, in the fine tradition of ridiculous upper-class names — who knows that the right way to win a man like Ian is not to like him too much, but can't stop herself anyway.

Having no trouble with Ian's pathologically preferred tango of spite and sex is Ann O'Neill, a married woman also having a high-profile affair with another man. She and Ian spend the entire miniseries torturing each other, sometimes romantically but more often cruelly.

The Bond stuff is, on the whole, more enticing than Ann and Ian's psychological pas de deux, which skirts up against real issues before giving them a gauzy gloss of true love.

—By arrangement with Slate-Washington Post