I'm loving it. Which is astonishing because I never watch costume dramas and found the ten minutes of Downton Abbey I watched intolerable.
I was sceptical. The BBC did W&P on the radio the new year before last over an entire day (or was it two?). It was the Best Thing Ever - I still treasure the memory of the mellow mood I basked in for a good week afterwards.
My problem is that the TV series is just not down and dirty enough. As well as W&P and the full canon of earlier Russuans I read masses of Sholokov as a teen - it's hard for me to understand battle scenes that don't include actual entrails no longer encased within a body. I haven't felt any pain, or even any fear. There's no real sense of threat - that was much better fone in the radio version. And I agree about the lack of fierce, hectoring intensity - it might actually have been improved by having, say, an all Nigerian cast. English people just don't shout or argue with sufficient conviction.
However, that would have meant the loss of Paul Dano who is an utter revelation to me. Never seen him in anything else. Fascinated to learn he's not English - though that explains the ... deliberateness of his enunciation. It's absurd - in a cast full of staggeringly beautiful men he is undoubtably the one I'd carry off to my lair. I could listen to him speak For. Ever.
Anatole is breathtaking. Marya is by far the loveliest woman. Natasha simply doesn't compare to her radio equivalent - but they've made her part rather superficial here.
I'll be sad when it's finished.