The State Within is a six-part^[1] British television political thriller series, written and created by Lizzie Mickery and Daniel Percival, that was broadcast on BBC One in the United Kingdom from Thursday, 2 November 2006.^[2] The series, directed by Percival and Michael Offer and produced by Grainne Marmion, is a joint production between BBC Films and BBC America that follows Sir Mark Brydon (Jason Isaacs), the British Ambassador to Washington, who is caught in the centre of a political conspiracy threatening to depose Western governments. As such, he must prevent a war, all whilst facing his own personal dilemmas.

On 22 January 2007, the series was released on DVD in the United Kingdom.^[3] In the United States, the series premiered during Presidents Day weekend as a three-part miniseries, concluding on 24 February 2007. After being repeated on BBC Four in June 2007 as part of the channel's Conspiracy U.S.A. week of programming,^[4] the series subsequently released on Netflix worldwide, where it was edited down into seven 50-minute episodes.^[5] The series was subsequently nominated for two Golden Globe Awards in the categories Best Mini-Series or Motion Picture Made for Television and Best Actor - Miniseries or Television Film.

Lynne Warner (Sharon Gless) is the United States Secretary of Defense, Nicholas Brocklehurst (Ben Daniels) is nominally the British Counsellor External Affairs, but is a Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) agent assigned to embassy duty, and James Sinclair (Alex Jennings) is the former British ambassador to the fictional former Soviet republic of Tyrgyzstan (cf. Kyrgyzstan). This character resembles Craig Murray, the British ambassador who exposed British and American complicity in torture and human rights abuses in Uzbekistan.^[6]