Family Drama

PBS BRINGS BACK "THE FORSYTE SAGA"

In 1969 a 26-part BBC series aired in America to surprised acclaim, a show unlike anything we'd seen before. It was called "The Forsyte Saga." Not only did it bring a new audience to the Nobel Prize-winning author, John Galsworthy, it inspired WGBH Boston to launch Masterpiece Theatre, a Sundaynight flight into literary history that has been a church of culture for the last 30 years. This October the family that started it all is back: "The Forsyte Saga" comes to PBS in a new, eight-hour series that is stunning any way you look at it.

The production values are peerless, fitting for a story that goes right to the twist in Victorian society—its sensual materialism and reach for beauty so at odds with stem moral (and legal) accounting. Directors Christopher Menaul and David Moore capture the delirious nap of velvets, the satins like clotted cream, the bluish cast through pored-glass windowpanes. Geoffrey Burgon's music, variations on an old English love song, rises to a Brideshead Revisited level of sustained concentration. And the acting. With talent such as Corin Redgrave, Rupert Graves, and Amanda Root, family scenes are thickets of quickening virtuosity, eyes and ears missing nothing. Gina McKee (the crippled wife in Notting Hill) steps out of a Pre-Raphaelite painting to play the elusive Irene, a woman who "never belonged to her surroundings." And as the wife of possessive Soames Forsyte, she has pound sterling to play against. He is, as his uncle gibes, a "man of property," and if there is a villain in the story it is Soames. But played by Damian Lewis, the actor who was Steve McQueen-steely in Band of Brothers, he is impossible to hate. In this unlovable man we feel the ache of a poet, a poet who has no words. The power he brings to the final minutes of this amazing series is a breakthrough of blossoming—a masterpiece.

LAURA JACOBS

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