Dickensian

BBC One's Dickensian does something no adaptation had tried. It drops characters from across Charles Dickens's novels — Fagin, Miss Havisham, Ebenezer Scrooge, the Bumbles, Inspector Bucket — into a single Victorian London neighborhood, where their stories intertwine around the murder of Jacob Marley.

The period detail is pure Dickens: candlelit counting-houses, debtors' dread, Christmas-morning charity and workhouse cruelty, all rendered in the soot-and-gaslight London of the mid-1800s. The twenty half-hour episodes play like a Victorian serial novel — which is exactly the point.

Victorian fans love it as the ultimate Dickens mashup — a what-if-all-his-characters-were-neighbors thought experiment. Its performances find new shades in figures as familiar as Fagin and Miss Havisham.