Great Expectations review: BBC One’s new adaptation of the Dickens classic

Olivia Colman as Miss Havisham and Fionn Whitehead as Pip in Great Expectations

(Image credit: Miya Mizuno/BBC)

published 30 March 2023

There have been at least 18 prominent adaptations of Great Expectations since the invention of the moving image, said Nick Hilton in The Independent. “That’s Pip upon Pip, Magwitch upon Magwitch, Miss Havisham upon Miss Havisham.” Now, “for no discernible reason”, the BBC is treating its viewers to a new one, this time scripted by the Peaky Blinders supremo Steven Knight. The results, alas, are only so-so.

The drama follows the adventures of Pip (Tom Sweet as a boy, Fionn Whitehead later), the orphan from the Kent marshes who is thrust into the orbit of Miss Havisham (Olivia Colman). Aspects of Knight’s telling of Dickens’s classic are “familiar” (there are the usual images of stopped clocks and wedding dresses); but he has innovated by, for instance, having his characters make liberal use of the F-word. I didn’t dislike this version; there is much to enjoy in it. But it feels a bit “needless”.

Great Expectations? More like “Woke Desecrations”, said Christopher Stevens in the Daily Mail. This dire series butchers Dickens’s book, doing away with his poetic language and ruining key characters (innocent Pip, for instance, is here presented as an insolent adolescent). And while Colman is “the saving” of the series, her Miss Havisham is imagined as “a drug-addled opium smoker”, which is plainly “imbecilic”.