What the Dickens! Do we really need another TV Great Expectations?
Coronavirus might have brought the television and film industries to a total standstill, but not even a catastrophic global pandemic can change some things. Which is to say that BBC One has just announced a new adaptation of Great Expectations.
This is great news, because it will introduce the Charles Dickens classic to anyone who didn’t watch the BBC One Great Expectations adaptation from 2011. Or the BBC’s 1981 adaptation of Great Expectations. Or the BBC’s 1967 adaptation of Great Expectations. Or the BBC’s 1959 adaptation of Great Expectations. Or the NBC adaptation from 1954, or ITV’s 1989 adaptation, or any of the various Great Expectations films made in 1917, 1922, 1934, 1946, 1974, 1983, 1998, 1999 or 2012. If you haven’t seen any of those, this new Great Expectations should be a treat.
Of course, you could argue that when a work is as heavily adapted as Great Expectations, the joy of watching it will be seeing the space it carves for itself and the themes it chooses to illuminate. How faithful they are to the source material, how much they reflect the times in which they were made, the new lens through which the audience can see characters who risked devolving into archetype. Which would be great, except this new version is going to be made by the creative team behind Tom Hardy’s voodoo- and incest-tinged gothic drama Taboo.
The new miniseries – a co-production between BBC One and FX – counts Steven Knight as a writer and Hardy and Ridley Scott as producers. And this means we’re probably going to be in for the most miserable version of Great Expectations yet. The commission makes sense, because this is also the braintrust behind the most recent version of A Christmas Carol. And that was very much Scrooge Goes Grimdark, in which our brooding, dirt-spackled hero found himself weighed down with grief over a factory fire. There was swearing. There was gratuitous gravestone urination. There was – and this is the greatest crime that an adaptation of A Christmas Carol can commit in the 21st century – not a single Muppet to be found.
And that was just A Christmas Carol. With all its orphans and cruelty and disappointment, Great Expectations is already a bit of a bummer. So lord knows how Knight will manage to grubby it up. Perhaps Miss Havisham could end up in hospital after giving herself a tattoo with an infected needle. Maybe Pip will find himself strung out on opiates. Could Estella possibly buy a Stanley knife and start doling out vigilante justice to children and the elderly? The adaptation is going to make us all miserable anyway, so why not go the whole hog?
Of course, I’m speaking far too soon here. Knight’s A Christmas Carol adaptation was a ratings winner. Plenty of critics managed to take a lot of pleasure from it. Its cast was absolutely top notch. Who’s to say the same won’t be the case here? If nothing else, you’d have to imagine that Hardy is lining himself up to play Magwitch, which would be extremely watchable.
But even if this new Great Expectations ends up a disappointment, at least we can take two important things from it. First, this is Great Expectations – if you don’t like this adaptation, then another one will be along in a couple of years. And, second, if Knight is writing this, then it means he isn’t currently writing any more episodes of See on Apple TV+. That alone has to be worth something.