Refuge in "Bleak House"

Masterpiece Theatre's languid take on the Dickens classic is a refreshing break from our sound-bite, bloggified culture.

By Stephanie Zacharek

Read more: Stephanie Zacharek, TV, PBS, Gillian Anderson, Arts & Entertainment, Reviews

Gillian Anderson in "Bleak House."

Feb. 4, 2006 | Skimming is the new reading. As newspapers scramble to hold onto their dwindling audience, magazines shrink the size of their articles down to caption size (or replace them altogether with "charticles") and bloggers compete to capture whatever shards remain of our already fragmented attention, one thing is clear: The act of reading -- of hunkering down and focusing on one piece of writing at a time, all the way through -- is quickly becoming a luxury we can't afford, at least not if we're pretending to fight that losing -- and increasingly pointless -- battle known as "keeping up."

Now more than ever, we need Masterpiece Theatre's "Bleak House."

In the past few weeks I've had numerous conversations with people, some of whom haven't looked at Masterpiece Theatre in years, who suddenly found themselves hooked on this British-made Charles Dickens adaptation, currently airing on PBS. (The series began with a two-hour opener on Jan. 22 and will continue through the month of February, ending on the 26th.) That's what happened to me: I turned the show on, never having read the book, and almost immediately slipped into its world.

Many of us have become used to the experience, pleasurable in its own right, of sitting down with a fat DVD box set (a season's worth of a novelistic TV series like "Alias" or "Lost," for instance) and watching a complete arc in a few greedy stretches. It can be fun to whiz through some six months' worth of shows at a clip -- akin to the act of reading pages as quickly as you can turn them. But the downside is that you lose any sense of anticipation between episodes. Cliffhangers become nothing more than puddles to jump. By the time you've even formulated the question "Who shot JR?" (and made a quick trip to the fridge), you can have the answer.

"Bleak House" will be available on DVD on Feb. 28, almost immediately after the series completes its TV run. But nearly everyone I know who has begun to watch the show prefers to see it the old-fashioned way, on successive Sunday nights, as it airs -- a way of approaching Dickens' work that's not far off from the way his earliest reading public would await each installment of his newspaper serials. Dickens' biographer Edgar Johnson has written about how American fans waited at the docks in New York, shouting out to the crew of an incoming ship, "Is Little Nell dead?"

Just like those faithful readers, the fans of this "Bleak House," the ones who haven't read it, are left to wonder: Will anyone ever unlock the secrets of the disputed will in the Jarndyce v. Jarndyce case, and if so, who will benefit? What will become of the quietly compelling Esther Summerson, a girl of sterling character who has no family of her own, and who has been brought to live at the ominously named Bleak House by the kindly John Jarndyce (whose own family traumas have caused him great suffering)? Who is Nemo, found mysteriously dead in his room, and what happened to him? And just what are we to make of the stunningly cool Lady Honoria Dedlock, an inscrutable beauty whom we might think incapable of human emotion -- until she faints dead away at the sight of a particularly distinctive sample of handwriting, a style of penmanship in which a curvily graceful J, as found in the name Jarndyce, looks more like an elegant musical notation than a simple letter?

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