Great Expectations; Tempting Fortune

“This Great Expectations looks utterly sensational. Those murky marshland scenes were beautifully realised – eerie, atmospheric and slick with frost-bitten mud that you could almost feel underneath your fingernails. Some early reviews have been outraged by departures from the text but the first episode, at least, stayed fairly close to the source material.”
Rachel Sigee, The i

“There’s a lot to enjoy about this Great Expectations. It has, at its heart, a fabulously entertaining story (all credit Mr Dickens), which is beautifully mounted on Sonja Klaus’s production design, and atmospherically shot by Dan Atherton. But the truth is that this adaptation of the great novel is needless and lazy. It has been scarcely over a decade since the BBC’s last lavish spin on the tale, and so, even with the infusion of sex and violence and post-colonial theory, it is hard to feel excited about this new take.”
Nick Hilton, The Independent

“When there have been so many adaptations of a great novel you need something remarkable to justify another, something beyond a stark opening suicide attempt and throwing in the F-word in at 21 minutes. Tom Sweet as younger Pip and Fionn Whitehead as older Pip do perfectly good jobs, as do Chloe Lea and Shalom Brune-Franklin as the younger and older Estella. However, it looks as if we’ll be relying on Olivia Colman’s Miss Havisham in a grubby wedding dress, 20 pearl necklaces and a fondness for opium to provide any sort of thrill or sense of menace in a production that so far feels half-hearted.”
Carol Midgley, The Times

“She appears only in the final few scenes of the opening episode, which was the only one available for review, but it is clear that Olivia Colman is her predictably excellent self; there is a risk she will reduce everything else to filler while viewers await her next mesmerising appearance. The rest of it – so far at least – is standard, solid fare.”
Lucy Mangan, The Guardian

“Let’s not get our knickers in a twist about the swearing. But why rewrite so many of the original lines? It might make sense if the original was written in a style that would fox modern viewers. But it’s Great Expectations, not The Canterbury Tales. Much of Dickens’s dialogue could slot straight into a modern TV drama with only minor adjustments.”
Anita Singh, The Telegraph

“Ferociously protective of his novels and his characters, Dickens could never have forgiven the corporation for this joyless travesty of Great Expectations. All the characters have been needlessly rewritten, and nothing about the way they live rings true either. All of it looked stagey, shot in the studio with computer graphics dropped into the background like painted scenery. The only blessing is that the whole thing is so underlit, it’s practically invisible.”
Christopher Stevens, Daily Mail

“It wasn’t the contestants’ ineptitude that made for such strangely absorbing telly, but their intriguingly different approaches to life. As with the recent BBC hit The Traitors, this was discord sown not by production staff in a format strategy meeting, but the contestants’ character, beliefs and attitude getting tested in real time. Like The Traitors and the best of Big Brother, Tempting Fortune shows what human beings are made of. I’m sorely tempted to watch the whole series.”
Carol Midgley, The Times

“Both Carolynne and Leni have decided to use the show as an end in itself, rather than the means to an end, which is quite interesting. Otherwise it’s formulaic and the casting is uninspired. There seem to be three Americans among these British contestants, one of whom is a former basketball player who swiftly appoints himself as leader of the group. Oh, I almost forgot to mention the presenter. It’s Paddy McGuinness, in a pointless role that involves telling us the rules several times over. You’ll be tempted to switch off.”
Anita Singh, The Telegraph