Bleak House

Almost faultless. The format is interesting: an initial one-hour episode, then the rest are 30 minutes, to mimic the way the original novel was published in serialised form. There's a lot of deliberately modern camera work - hand-held cameras, crash zooms, etc. (An attempt to draw in a younger audience, possibly). It has a quite extraordinary ensemble cast - almost every character is played by someone well known. It's probably unfair to single anyone out (though Charles Dance is simply superb as Tulkinghorn); really, almost every character is played delightfully well. It was one of the first BBC shows to be shot in high definition, so they tried really hard with the scenery, props, costumes, etc. to make sure everything could stand up to that level of detail, and it really shows. And an excellent script by Andrew Davies, too!

Perhaps the best adaptation of a **** novel I've seen. I watched the whole series on iPlayer early last year and then enjoyed it all over again this year (2026). The cast were fantastic throughout, though I particularly enjoyed the performances of Anna Maxwell Martin, Denis Lawson, and Burn Gorman. The grotesques were truly awful (Smallweed, Krook, Tulkinghorn, Turveydrop) and the other caricatures well drawn, the story strong and easier to follow than Jarndyce v Jarndyce, the music touching. I found my self in tears more than once, not just because of the sad moments in the tale, but because of the sheer excellence of the whole enterprise. I followed up with the same writer's Little Dorrit, which was very good, but didn't quite reach the heights of this magnificent Bleak House.