The Times - another Parade’s End review

Posted 2 days ago

Imagine a thinking person’s Downton Abbey. Attach the names Stoppard and Cumberbatch and you have this superb series

BBC Two, 9pm
Adapted by Tom Stoppard from four related novels by Ford Madox Ford, this five-part BBC/HBO period drama has quality written all over it, and that’s before you start listing the superlative cast. Benedict Cumberbatch is Christopher Tietjens, a brilliant government statistician from a wealthy landowning family who has a passionate tryst with the capricious Sylvia (Rebecca Hall) on a train. She is already pregnant, but Tietjens does the decent thing and marries her. Sylvia is soon bored. She describes her husband as “a precise sort of imbecile” — he is the kind of man who makes corrections in the margins of the Encyclopedia Britannica. But Cumberbatch’s performance is multi-layered. Tietjens, despite outward appearances, is no emotional cripple. He is a sensitive soul with a depth that his wife can’t get close to. She has a fling, and he falls for a spunky suffragette. Comparisons with Downton Abbey are inevitable — it covers the period up to and through the First World War and deals with subjects of class, wealth and privilege. But the key difference is that Parade’s End, like Tietjens, is intellectually superior. Stoppard’s script is superb. The dialogue is authentic and it soars whereDownton and other period offerings can so often clunk. It is the thinking person’s Downton Abbey.
source: cumberbatchweb