'Great Expectations' Comes at a Complicated Time for the British Period Piece
Steven Knight was once known for his gritty, compelling scripts for Dirty Pretty Things and Eastern Promises, but had shown his capability for historical fiction in Amazing Grace. All these would be a precursor for his output over the past decade, kicking off with the smash-hit Peaky Blinders and building in momentum with the Tom Hardy-starring Taboo, the Apple TV+ apocalypse fantasy See, an adaptation of A Christmas Carol, and last year’s SAS: Rogue Heroes – finding the time also to pen splashy film projects like Spencer, The Girl in the Spider’s Web, and Burnt. He’s a man of evident, enviable talent, nurtured from decades of recurring jobs on British TV throughout the 90s.
His latest, Great Expectations, prides itself on boldening the rich, thorny themes that plagued Victorian Britain – gendered violence, repression of sex, colonialism, and nasty but nuanced criminal vices – but Dickens was prohibited from writing about due to contemporary standards. It has pleased some and displeased others. But while it’s difficult to deny Great Expectations makes thoughtful embellishments to Dickens’ original text, it exists as a single example of a pervading aesthetic of British period adaptations, one Knight helped forge and by now feels distinctly tired.
Over its impressive six-season run, Peaky Blinders established a neo-historical fiction aesthetic: dialogue and dialects made no concessions for ears untrained to British regional accents, working class, urban stories were dripping in oppressive industrial production design, and all the violence, sex, and substance abuse once prevented from making it on-screen in TV’s more conservative eras were on full display.
