At risk of committing libel, I wonder if Knight has actually read Great Expectations, or if he has relied on a CliffsNotes summary. The characters that generations have grown up with are all present in a fashion: there’s Pip and Estella, tragic Miss Havisham and desperate old Abel Magwitch. But the opening scene, in which Pip attempts to hang himself from a bridge, indicates this is going to be, at best, a loose adaptation of the novel, and at worst an obnoxious travesty that thinks it needs to update the original’s British colonial values.

So the characters all swear like it’s going out of fashion, sometimes gratuitously — witness Pip, late to church, saying, “Oh, shit.” Matt Berry’s Pumblechook, channeling his Stephen Toast character to inadvertently hilarious effect, is shown to be a devotee of S&M, being whipped by Pip’s sister “Mrs. Joe.” In later episodes, it is suggested that Pip makes his money from dealing drugs, and the lawyer Jaggers is played by a rap artist who goes by the name “Bashy.” If you didn’t get the message, Knight and the cast are shouting, very loudly, that this is not your father’s Dickens (or even the 2012 Mike Newell film). This one is hip and contemporary. What a shame it’s so dismally executed.

[Sounds horrid, like the worst of the late 1960s-early 1970s excesses in film. — Ed]