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Regardless of its heritage,"Death comes to Pemberley"is badly written,carelessly cast and direly acted.Cliché follows cliché as the performers drop into their BBC Jane Austen mode with no attempt to get beneath their characters;offering only a rehash of the seemingly endless P&P reruns. The one performer with a bit of spirit is Mr T.Eve whose Magistrate is a straight steal from his Supt Boyd in "Waking the dead". The script is full of those embarrassing little mistakes that one would have thought might have been eliminated at a read through if anybody cared enough. Usually it's merely irritating,but with a major prestige production presumably selling abroad it is disgraceful that nobody further up the food chain didn't recognise sloppy writing - or,even worse,didn't think the audience would. "We need to talk"....well,somebody should have. Furthermore only the aforementioned Mr Eve looked as though he might possibly have lived in the early nineteenth century,the rest looking as though they were attending a rather expensive fancy dress party. "Death comes to Pemberley" looks like the product of a broadcaster so desperate to regain its reputation as a maker of quality drama that it has forgotten that the core audience for quality drama is still fairly literate despite the same broadcaster's ceaseless attempts to dumb them down.
score 4/10
ianlouisiana 5 January 2014
Reprint: https://www.imdb.com/review/rw2941070/ |
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