What's brought my present anti-BBC sentiments on, except their hiring Sarah Phelps to butcher Christie again and again? (I regret being gracious about her And Then There Were None now - if you don't get the main premise of the victims being indirectly guilty of murder, then you don't get the genius of Christie's plotting, and I should have realised that.) It's mostly down to The Luminaries, which has been snapped up by HBO Nordic and which I consequently have been able to watch practically at the same time as the UK. Now The Luminaries is by no means the worst costume drama the BBC has produced - it doesn't offend me the way, say, The Pale Horse travesty did. It's helped by the fact that it's an adaptation of a novel by a modern author, albeit set in the 19th century, so we don't get the painful spectacle of a script writer trying to "fix" the story by bringing in more "modern relevance". In fact Eleanor Catton - who wrote the novel - is herself responsible for the script, which means it must at least be respectful (I haven't read the original novel). At the same time, depressingly, letting authors adapt their own book seldom works well. You need someone with a bit of knowledge as to how the TV medium (as opposed to the written word) works. The Luminaries has some things going for it, but it's very, very slow.
Some positives first. As per usual with British drama, it's well-acted, and the settings look fine. The story takes place in New Zealand in the 1860s, and there's a gold rush going on, so there's a rag-tag, Wild West feel about the larger town the heroine reaches at the beginning of the story (um... not sure which town it's supposed to be now) and the smaller village she later ends up in. An early scene where the purity of a digger's gold is tested on the open street feels just exotic enough to catch one's interest. The Beeb can indulge in hiring a multi-ethnic cast without it looking out of place for the setting: in fact the plot demands it, which the execs must have loved. The characters are connected in intriguing and intricate ways. Though some of the characterisation seems clichéd - the prejudiced sheriff, the well-meaning but weak clergyman, the spineless politician etc. - there are some surprises along the way. The main villain, or villainess, is Lydia Wells (played by Eva Green, having fun), and she's worse news than the sheriff, the unscrupulous pimp and the ex-convict (her lover) combined. At this stage, not even a tragic back-story could make anyone believe that her actions are all the fault of the patriarchy. Her husband, Crosbie Wells, first looks like he's some drunken lout she got stuck with, but he turns out to be an intelligent man with a knack of befriending people.
But oh, the slowness. Eve Hewson, who plays the story's heroine Anna Wetherell, is lovely to look at: however, seeing her mooching around miserably in scene after scene with melancholy music in the background just gets too much. I watched the first three episodes available on HBO in the middle of the day two days in a row (my summer holiday has started, blissfully) and did not expect to be overly stimulated, but I was still frustrated by the snail's pace of the plot progression. Whenever Lydia and her ex-con squeeze were hatching some scheme (what's he doing in New Zealand, incidentally? Convicts were never sent there) things picked up, but none of the other story lines are that engaging. I liked Crosbie Wells, but I don''t much care who eventually shot him. Emery Staines, Anna's love interest and potential soul mate, is charming (Himesh Patel gets to show that the wetness of Jack Malik in Yesterday wasn't his fault) and his Maori pal Te Rau is sweet, but their adventures are hardly gripping either, and Anna just seems to be set up to be the perpetual victim.
From what I can see on IMDB, the series is only six episodes long all in all, so I'll probably watch all of it, being half-way in. However, I'm still waiting for a real return to form on part of the BBC. As costume drama is not the only thing they've handled less than competently lately - for instance, they've arrogantly dismissed well-founded criticism of Chris Chibnall's era of Doctor Who - maybe a more far-reaching rethink of the corporation's priorities is needed. Still, what do I know: it's not my tax money that's at stake here, after all.
