You must! The BBC's adaptation of Susanna Clarke's fantasy novel is a shining example of the boldness and brilliance of British TV.
You might remember a post from a few months ago entitled Upcoming Costume Dramas in which I got very excited about a number of television programmes and pretended to know what they were about before I'd actually seen them. Arthur and George was a satisfying watch which got more involving the longer you stuck with it, Banished didn't set my world on fire in the way I'd hoped and Poldark - well, you already know about Poldark. But the first of the four, was Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell and it has proved to be more surprising and worthwhile than I ever anticipated.
Ratings wise, it's probably not doing as well as the BBC had hoped, it dropped from 4.5 million viewers in its first week to 2.5 million in its second and it's been hovering around the same mark ever since. The main reason is that it's faced competition from cosy, WWII drama Home Fires on ITV, been overshadowed by the aggressive advertising campaign surrounding Channel 4's (wonderful) Humans and now shares a timeslot with a Sheridan Smith drama - that woman could take something I'd written and turn it into BAFTA fodder. But sadly, it's also the victim of a certain kind of snobbery that surrounds fantasy drama. Some people are under the impression that once you hit puberty, fantastical tales such as this cease being entertaining and start being "silly". They're wrong. Yes, JS&MN is about magic and faeries and dreamworlds, but it's also about madness and politics, horror and fear, it's certainly not for kids. It breaks my heart a little that so many people are missing out on something as wonderfully inventive as this.
We're now six episodes in to the seven part series and I feel the need to urge you to catch up while you can. There have been some incredibly beautiful costume dramas over the years; Little Dorrit and Bleak House are two that spring to mind, and more recently 1970s-set thriller The Game, but there's never been anything quite as visually impressive as this. We all know costume dramas are expensive but JS&MN seems to have had money poured into it. The scale of the sets is vast - entire town squares have been dressed to look as they would have in 1806 and filled with extras in full, regency costumes, there's certainly no shying away from wide shots, afraid that they might catch a 21st century PVC drainpipe in the background. In six episodes we've travelled from York Cathedral to Venice by way of slave ships and the Napoleonic War. Then on top of all this, there's the magic. There have been boats conjoured from water, roads built across mountains and rampaging horses raised out of sand. These are not the kind of quaint FX we're used to seeing on TV, impressive in their way but laughable compared to what Hollywood can offer. These are so stunning they make you want to applaud.
The BBC have been brave to invest so much in a story that is so nebulus and at times, difficult to keep up with. The whole thing feels quite Dickensian with its underlying theme of mystery and a frankly enormous cast. A printout would've been helpful in the earlier episodes to keep track of the characters and their tangled affairs. It also feels long, but that's not a criticism. You get a sense that this could have been squeezed into four or five episodes, but instead it's been allowed to spread out over seven, meaning that there is time for pauses and conversations alongside the moments of frenetic action.
The success of a drama is measured by its ability to make people feel and to get them talking. Anyone who has been watching JS&MR will tell you that it has been a triumph. My fear is that if dramas as bold as this don't get seen by enough people, they won't get made, and that would be a tragedy. Bravo to Susanna Clarke and screenwriter Peter Harness. Bravo to director Toby Haynes. Bravo to Bertie Carvell, Eddie Marsan and all the cast. Bravo to anyone who has had a hand in this masterpiece. It's a shining example of what British television makers are capable of.
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