A particular speech of Mr. Jaggers's from episode 3 neatly sums up this whole enterprise, and Steven Knight's whole approach to Dickens. When Pip asks why Jaggers has been made his guardian, Jaggers answers, "Because I am known to be evil. Celebrated for it. And your benefactor knows that in an evil place like London, attachment to virtue would be fatal."
In almost any other production, that might be conveying something like bitter sarcasm or world-weary lament or at least deliberate exaggeration. In this one, where there is no subtext, subtlety, or wit, and everything is to be taken at face value, there's no other way to hear it but as straightforward truth. It's so laughably on the nose that it put me in mind of an old joke from "Mystery Science Theater 3000," where an obviously villainous character arrived on the scene and one of the guys quipped, "Hi, I'm Bob Evil!"
To be fair, there's no better person to convey such a message than the guy who keeps escorting Pip into rooms inhabited by freshly dead bodies. No kidding, this happens twice in two episodes. (As Oscar Wilde would have said, this looks like carelessness.) The repeated attempt to shock us in the exact same way -- the only difference being that the second corpse is naked -- exemplifies the incoherent mess of the story structure here. Character arcs are wrenched out of their courses and set adrift; everyone continues to give away his or her motives and secrets at every opportunity; and somehow, we're supposed to follow a long, convoluted, utterly uninteresting plot about Pip and Jaggers's business ventures, livened up by occasional bouts of vomiting.
Nandini Balial writes in an excellent review at RogerEbert.com, "In 'Great Expectations,' Knight’s writing constantly hits the audience over the head, as if to cement the idea that adding sex and violence makes something edgier and cooler, and therefore better than what came before." Needless to say, it does not make it any of those things. Instead, this series commits the truly unforgivable sin against a Dickens work: making it dull.
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