Olivia Colman and Fionn Whitehead navigate the miserable world of 19th century London in Great Expectations trailer
The FX limited series comes from Peaky Blinders writer Steven Knight, his second Dickens adaptation after 2019's A Christmas Carol
By all accounts, real life in 1800s England—especially as a poor orphan—looked a whole lot less Bridgerton and a whole lot more, well, absolutely fucking wretched. And if stories about poor, miserable orphans are your thing (or you’ve ever sat through a high school English curriculum), you’ll know that no one does them better than the master himself, Charles Dickens. Well, Dickens and his modern-day admirer, Peaky Blinders’ Steven Knight.
Knight’s new FX limited series is adapted from Dickens’ 1860s classic Great Expectations, a coming-of-age novel about an orphan named Pip that contains many scenes involving what Wikipedia delightfully refers to as “extreme imagery–poverty, prison ships and chains, and fights to the death.” Just from this two-minute trailer, it’s abundantly clear that Knight has done his homework, at least in the aforementioned “extreme imagery” department.