Ford Madox Ford's is a big tome and deserves a five-hour adaptation, with a good script and the best actors. This is about as good on all counts as money can buy, and echoes the successful adaptation of Waugh's 'Sword of Honour', similarly about a decent man in an unhappy marriage who goes to war.
The only TWNH was that a member of the audience would fall asleep, but we're sorry to say that one of us did. Why? Well the sex was boring, as Sylvia (Rebecca Hall redefines 'shallow' in a great performance) would say. The unpardonable lapse, though, was during a set-piece scene of a lunch. It looked beautiful, and featured wonderful actors delivering witty lines impeccably, but overall it was underwhelming and slightly self-conscious. No doubt things will improve when we reach the Great War (unlike 'Downton Abbey', but this is in a different league altogether) and it isn't as though it lacks pace, but the episode was concerned only with repressive, class-ridden pre-WWI society and felt very much like a light drawing-room comedy. All the better to contrast with the grim conflict approaching and the post-war disillusion, but that is where the episodic structure reveals its flaws.
Those with more patience and energy, and fans of drawing-room comedies, will enjoy it all.
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