maik434 I think it's a totally original and powerful series that actually magnetizes you from the first episode to the last one. Amazing interpretations, beautiful and appropriate costumes and scenery and generally very careful work at every point. Congratulations to all contributors, thank you!

eapplebaum I found this series thoroughly engaging and well done. I found it exciting and riveting, especially because the story is based on, or the more accurate versions of Dickens stories and then combines them. I love it! I would LOVE to see a second series where we follow Scrooge through his journey with the Ghost of present, past and future! I MUST know what happens to Arthur! Will Amelia remain in her dining room forever like that? Will she ever forgive Arthur and take him back into her heart? What about Honoria!? Will she find out what Francis has done? Wll she be reunited with her lovely man and their living child? where do the lawyer take the child? And most of all, What will become of Oliver? Will he eventually find his true family? The little actor who plays him is SO SO SO adorable I wish I could adopt that little boy and shower him in love and care!!

Prismark10 Tony Jordan a long time writer for Eastenders created this soap opera type serial based on various Dickens novels and mixes various characters.There were main story threads involving the killing of Jacob Marley that is investigated by Inspector Bucket. Then there is the pending marriage of Miss Havisham.The series started in Christmas 2015 in a 30 minute format usually ending with a cliffhanger very much in the mould of the weekly editions of the Dickens stories. The series went on until late February 2016 and being irregularly scheduled which meant hard work to follow it around and find out when it was shown.The final episode tied up some story strands leaving the fate of the characters to be carried on in their respective novels. For example we last see Scrooge being bothered by ghostly sounds and images.However the show did not work for me, familiar characters but never really developed my interest. We have enough soap operas on television without having a Dickens based one and the final double episode was patchy in places.Maybe a shorter, sharper serial would have worked better.

jc-osms The idea of bringing together into one narrative different fictional characters has been done recently and brilliantly in the likes of "Penny Dreadful" but this new BBC series takes it up a few notches more, not only in the number of disparate characters but of course that they are all from the world of Charles Dickens.I must admit I was concerned when I read that the series was devised by the producer of the Beeb's dreadful soap opera "Eastenders" but, five episodes in, these Londoners I can stand. It is slightly confusing to see some resurrected characters walking about like Nancy from "Oliver Twist", Little Nell from "The Old Curiosity Shop" and Miss Haversham from "Great Expectations" and one wonders if they are going to meet the same end as before, also in my reading of the former, I didn't have Nancy pegged as a call-girl as here and attending, shall we say, to Jacob Marley too.The show is set up along the same lines as the channel's previously successful adaptation of "Bleak House", i.e. in thirty minute programmes, usually with a kind of cliff- hanging climax at the end of each episode, which of course ties in well with the weekly publication method that Dickens himself worked to. The main story of the many plot strands appears to be the death of Jacob Marley from "A Christmas Carol", with Inspector Bucket of "Bleak House" on the trail, but a close second appears to be the anticipated jilting of Miss Haversham too.As you'd expect, the production values are high, the settings are superb, interiors and exteriors, the latter especially played out in the winter snow. I'd imagine the eyes of the various agencies for actors in the UK all lit up when they got wind of this production, so many of them are employed here, although not too many big names that I can see, perhaps Stephen Rea in another mannered portrayal of Bucket, Caroline Quentin as the domineering Mrs Bumble and Pauline Collins having fun as that old soak Mrs Gamp being the most identifiable. There's also a smattering of new characters too just to help the plots develop and to date these creations are fitting in seamlessly well.Anyway, I'm thoroughly enjoying it now that I'm familiar with the main characters and can see the plot coming nicely to the boil. I'm just wondering if some of the best known nicer characters like Pip from "Great Expectations", Nicholas Nickleby or David Copperfield might yet show up, but really there's more than enough to be going in with. With another fifteen episodes to go, there's plenty of time for surprises yet.Some might see this interpretation of Dickens as manipulative or even sacrilegious but with modern writers devising authorised use of characters by say Charlotte Bronte and Ian Fleming to give two very different examples, personally I'm finding it fun and rather enjoying it so far.