South Riding

South Riding creates memorable characters, particularly Burton and Carne, and it's beautifully filmed.

South Riding has everything you could want from a Masterpiece event: perfect period details, a forlornly gray surf, a swelling soundtrack, disputes over crunchy-gravel real estate, whistling trains and black-tie dinners in hotels, a believable and compelling story involving multiple characters and plots and a faithfulness to its original material that allows for a textured, even sorrowful, bleakness.

These are, in short, characters with a long literary-and Hollywood-pedigree. Which makes all the more impressive the vividness and mystery they bring to this series (adapted by Andrew Davies from a 1936 novel by Winifred Holtby)--thanks, needless to say, to extraordinarily seductive performances.

Mr. Davies appears to have struggled with the material...But his dialogue is as sharp as ever, and there are excellent scenes between Sarah and Mrs. Beddows (Penelope Wilton), her champion on the school board, and Sarah and Robert (David Morrissey), the conservative landowner she wins to her side (in more ways than one).

For fans of the canon, South Riding is "Masterpiece" comfort food, enjoyable enough in the moment, but melting away to nothing but sugar and fat by morning.

As is, South Riding (named for its fictional community in Yorkshire) is a handsome production, but not an especially memorable one--conjuring only a few moments worthy of the "Masterpiece" pedigree before riding into the sunset.

If only Holtby and screenwriter Andrew Davies hadn't larded the story with so many cliches, not to mention people who seem like second-rate versions of characters created by Jane Austen and Charlotte Bronte.