Audiences are in for a treat this fall with Bleak House, the risky new series from HBO. The show’s creator, Charles Dickens, is virtually unknown to television audiences, having previously made a name for himself writing a few well-received novels. Even so, the BBC reportedly tried to persuade Dickens into adapting his most recent work, David Copperfield, for the screen. Negotiations disintegrated over “creative differences,” though inside sources say it was really due to Dickens’ many eccentricities.
Supposedly, Dickens insists the novel is semi-autobiographical despite it being set in the early 1800s, a delusion BBC execs believe implicate a substance abuse problem. He also dresses in period-perfect Victorian garb, an idiosyncrasy HBO will probably overlook as a refreshing contrast to its show-runner jeans-and-hoodies uniform.
Once Dickens became a free agent, HBO quickly rang him up. The network loves its quirky auteurs, but this time they may be in over their heads. Though he apparently was unaware of what a television was when first approached by the BBC, Dickens has recently claimed he is ready to revolutionize the medium.
“I have worked quite well in serial novels thus far and I think the formula may be applicable to this metal box the Americans love so much,” Dickens said in an interview shortly after signing with HBO. “What I will do is write a very, very long story, but break it up into much smaller stories that can be performed live, which has ever been done before. Who they are performed for is not of my concern, but being paid per serial makes for a happy purse.”
It looks like he will make good use of his deal. Whereas typical HBO dramas clock in at around a dozen episodes per season, Bleak House will be presented in a whopping 67 episodes. To help him handle the stress, HBO set Dickens up with Deadwood’s David Milch to get some showrunning pointers. Ever since their meeting, Dickens has refused to write any episode more than an hour before deadline, instead going for long walks all over L.A. and writing long, illegible letters to friends complaining about said deadlines. The only aspect of the script that is sorted out before shooting is the character names. Those are created with the help of an entire room of writers hired just for the purpose, who choose word combinations out of a card deck much like “Cards Against Humanity” and post them on a large white board.
As a compromise for this unorthodox methodology, HBO has managed to snag complete control over casting. After weeks of audience debate over who would follow up Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson in this season of True Detective, HBO revealed that front-runners Elisabeth Moss and Colin Farrell had defected to Bleak House. In a quick recasting, True Detective will now feature Nicholas Cage and Aziz Ansari in the lead roles.
The network has released the first four episodes of Bleak House to reviewers ahead of its October premiere, but the pace is slow, to say the least. We know that Moss plays Caddy Jellyby, a sad woman who befriends the main character, Esther Summerson, played by Emmy Rossum. Dickens reportedly tried to get young unknown actress Nelly Ternan in to read for the role but was vetoed by the network for lack of star power. (We’ve been told she was granted a conciliatory role as Mrs. Bagnet, a decision many think linked to the showrunner’s rumored affair with Ternan.) Eddie Redmayne was also brought on soon after filming a biopic about Stephen Hawking in the off-chance HBO can add one more “Academy Award-nominated” to their promotional materials.
Due to the abundance of lady roles in Dickens’ story, critics will be happy to know the series easily passes the Bechdel test in the third episode during a meet-cute between Esther and Ada Clare, played by Amanda Seyfried. Unfortunately, though Esther tells much of the story from her perspective, she seems to harbor a lot of internalized misogyny. Her narration consists largely of comparing her self-proclaimed ugly countenance to her favorite doll, a one-of-a-kind prop created by Karl Lagerfeld to look just like Cara Delevingne (available for sale on HBO.com).
To top it off, in her introduction to the story Rossum bares it all on camera for an entire twenty minutes broken up only by short flashbacks. When asked if this was another instance of the network trolling for viewers, they said in a statement, “HBO believes in telling honest stories, and if the honest story is that this character would typically deliver twenty-minute soliloquies in the nude then we refuse to stray from the truth.”
The series is certain to be confusing and complex and therefore probably genius. Though the premiere episode consists almost entirely of shots of fog with a narrator describing said fog in detail, The New Yorker has already proclaimed it “the best drama of the new Millennium.” Vince Gilligan has not been seen since the preview DVDs surfaced and is reportedly lying in the fetal position in his bathtub, cuddling his Emmys. We will see if the audience is similarly shaken by this televised revolution.
