Decoding Dickens: Hulu’s 'Great Expectations' Is Weird & Wonderful

In 2019, the BBC and FX brought us writer Stephen Knight's (Peaky Blinders) dark and dire interpretation of A Christmas Carol. If you thought Charles Dickens couldn’t get any grimmer or weirder, you were wrong. His follow up, the new FX/BBC production of Great Expectations, probably isn’t for Dickens purists, and Knight’s brand includes casual expletives, explicit violence, and suicide. If, however, this is your cup of tea, Knight, director Brady Hood and an accomplished cast tackle Dickens’ masterpiece with skill and bravado.

Great Expectations was serialized in 1860, and published in book form in 1861, toward the end of Dickens’ life. Set in the 1830’s, it tells the story of Pip (Tom Sweet as a child, as an adult by Fionn Whitehead) an orphan who lives with his sister Sara Gargery (Hayley Squires) and her blacksmith husband Joe (Owen McDonnell). Pip works in the forge; however, in a break from Dickens’ original, has aspirations that seem unlikely to be fulfilled. He reads; he has a wide vocabulary, and the production’s backstory for Pip and Sara is that they have come down in the world, which makes perfect sense.

Sara, however, is abusive nearly all the time, although she allows Joe, one of Dickens’ sublimely loving characters, to tease her into good humor. The family lives in Kent near the Thames Estuary, a bleak and chilling landscape, and Pip watches the ships pass on their way to and from London, or on their way to Australia with convicts aboard. The whole community is familiar with hearing the cannon fire that announces a convict’s escape.