Fantastic!

Clever and entertaining enough to recommend even to members of the 1%

Amazing worth wacthing. So good. Biased but well made with many good points.

Story: It's very simple but honestly that is fine.

As an adaptation of Anthony Trollope's brilliant Palliser series, I fail to see how this production could have been any worse. What appears to have happened (this is pure speculation) is that someone unfamiliar with Trollope's work hired novelist Simon Raven to write the series, and Raven decided that Trollope didn't know how to tell his own stories and that he -- Raven -- would tell better ones using the same character names.For those who have read the books, here is a partial list of reasons why you should steer very clear of this regrettable "adaptation" (spoilers ahead). The following appalling things happen in the TV series: Phineas Finn is sleeping with Mary Flood Jones, and marries her only because she gets pregnant.The love between Plantagenet Palliser and Lady Dumbello is based entirely on their mutual interest in decimal coinage.Lady Glencora gets a big long death scene.Dolly Longstaffe is a friend of Lady Glencora's.The elder Duke of Omnium is a dirty old man who pinches his nurse.Burgo Fitzgerald is ugly, and for some bizarre reason, he and his aunt appear to be on the verge of going to bed together.Almost all of the casting is way off the mark.All of that delicious, true-to-life dialog, that is a large part of the fun of reading Trollope and that adapts so well to the screen, has been eliminated, and replaced with glib pseudo-witticisms and cheap innuendos.All of the novels' thoughtful and searching treatment of character has been drained away and replaced with a lot of utterly uninteresting people in drably sensational situations. The plots have been altered and the emotional interest removed entirely.This is a very, very incomplete list of things Raven changed -- not one of them for the better. Raven also added no end of scenes of stupid hijinks which not only are not in any of the books, but are not engaging in any way themselves.All told, this production is a shabby and disrespectful treatment of some truly great novels, and has little merit as anything else. I was excited when I first found out that the Pallisers had been adapted for the screen as a miniseries. I figured, with such great material to work with, how bad can it be? The answer is, *astoundingly* bad. If you admire Trollope even dimly, stay very far away from this utter stinkbomb. If you want to see a Trollope novel adapted to the screen with both fidelity and artistic competence, see Masterpiece Theatre's recent production of *He Knew He Was Right*.

"The Pallisers" is a visual retelling of six sequential novels of Anthony Trollope dealing with the Palliser clan through a couple of decades in the nineteenth century.The novels have been truncated (for instance, the whole triangle of Mr. Cheeseacre, Mrs. Greenow and Captain Bellfield has been excised from the part covering CAN YOU FORGIVE HER?) but Trollope always was too baggy and needed trimming. And for Trollope fanatics, they do trot Griselda Grantley into the first episode.What remains is so sprawling, Barrington Erle and Dolly Longstaffe (a slight character in the Palliser novels!) are used, individually and in tandem, as a running Greek Chorus through the series. This is a controversial decision, but Moray Watson's Erle is a likable and perhaps absent-minded consummate political insider; while Donald Pickering's Dolly -- acting the lackadaisical, foppish man-about-town -- shows deeper waters running in him than the Dolly from THE WAY WE LIVE NOW. Though this series was made in the days when this kind of show was performed like a videotaped play, crude effects and rear photography do not interfere with the quality of the production. The sets and costumes are gorgeous and all the exterior party scenes look great.What "The Pallisers" lacks in effects, it more than compensates for in the acting department.The show is carried by beautiful Susan Hampshire as Lady Glencora and the sometimes inaudible Philip Latham as Plantagenet Palliser. It's full of solid British actors -- old timers like Roland Culver, Basil Dingham and Roger Livesey, and up-and-comers like Derek Jacobi, Penelope Keith, Anthony Andrews and Jeremy Irons. Stockpiled with notable British actors in small parts, American viewers will recognize Edward Hardwicke of "Sherlock Holmes" and Peter Sallis of Wallace and Gromit amongst others.Mystery writer John Dickson Carr once had a character ask, "What if Trollope wrote like Dickens?" Well, Dickens was the better word smith, his writing has greater charm, his characters spring more off the page. His stories were better, his various plots dovetailed better than Trollope's do, and when Dickens is truncated the stuff that is excised is often so good it's missed.Yet Trollope's lesser genius seems to adapt better for television. When Dickens is done accurately, his characters are almost too grotesque on the small screen (see the family of Wackford Squeers in the Nigel Havers "Nicholas Nickleby." Trollope's books are packed with pages of yawn-inducing material this is much more dispensable than anything from Dickens. Trollope's many ill-defined, throw-away characters can be thrown away, and those who remain, sometimes more definable by their names than their characters on the page, seem more suitable for television because they're not larger-than-life. An amorphous mass of literature like Trollope's six Palliser novels can be more properly shaped for television installments than Dickens by judicious pruning.There's a lot of nipping and tucking of Trollope in "The Pallisers", and that's a good thing. The individual novels, as dramatized, flow from story to story like a Victorian soap opera as characters age, die, are born, have flings, get married, get elected, and so forth."The Pallisers" is a long-term commitment that may not suit today's shorter attention spans, but it still can be addictive; and DVDs make it a far cry from the days before normal houses had videotape recorders and viewers had to be on the spot every week for 26 weeks to see this solid saga unfold.

They really don't make them like this any more - nearly 20 hours of TV devoted to six Trollope novels. The costumes are fabulous, the sets lavish, the acting superb. The whole is set around the characters of Lady Glencora Palliser (Susan Hampshire) and her husband, Plantagenet (Philip Latham), who string the various stories together more or less loosely. We start out with a miserable and rebellious Glencora and her arranged marriage with Plantagenet, follow the tale of Alice Vavasour and her suitors, then continue with Phineas Finn and his turbulent life. On to the wicked Lizzie Eustace, back to Phineas and then on to poor Emily Wharton. The last chapter is about the Duke's children, Silverbridge, Mary and Gerald. Around these central characters you have a huge cast of supporting characters, every one of them beautifully portrayed. The series has stood the test of time very well indeed, probably because they did it all well to begin with - the costumes all authentic and hand made, no zippers here! What a delight.

This series was a huge undertaking, of a sort that probably would not be attempted today. It was an adaptation of Trollope's "Palliser" novels, and dealt with a great many characters and intertwining plots. The series worked best for viewers who could take an interest in the fictional politics of the time, as Plantagenet Palliser, like most of the men in the story, is a politician and this theme runs throughout the series. However, Susan Hampshire as Lady Glencora, his mismatched wife, provides a romantic strain as well, though she eventually adopts her husbands concerns and interests as her own. The story from time to time veers away from these two main characters, and becomes quite entertaining as it delves into the complicated life of the scheming Lizzy Eustace, and also that of the greenhorn politician from Ireland, Phineas Phinn. His problems with women and his trial for murder (including a cross-examination in Latin!) are among the most interesting and enjoyable passages in the series. This is a thoroughly entertaining series for those who can just relax into the Victorian atmosphere and are not in a hurry to get to the end.