I Watched A Masterpiece Series So Bad I Turned It Off

John Galsworthy Should Be Turning in His Grave

The Brits dropped a new TV adaptation of The Forsyte Saga so of course I rushed to PBS to watch it. My mother and I discovered the early 2000s adaptation but a year or two ago, and since then every time we see Damian Lewis we say “Oh no Soames is here!” 

Which is crazy because most of those times he’s been appearing as Henry VIII, who should be more iconic than Soames Forsyte. But he isn’t! Damian Lewis went off crazy-style with his performance as Britain’s Most Incel (tough competition, too), and the rest of the miniseries was full of surprises and unsurprises and Britishery enough to ensorcel both a mom and a normal person.

So we had high hopes for the new adaptation. It fucking blows, though. I turned it off half an hour into the fifty-minute premiere.

Naively, I had believed that television adaptations of English literary classics shown on public television were immune to second-screen-ification. Now I stand corrected. Fuck this stupid baka media landscape.

For the normies in the audience, allow me to explain that The Forsyte Saga is a collection of written works by extremely British guy John Galsworthy which chronicle the difficult transition from Victorian social norms to 20th Century ones by tracking one particular well-off English family, the Forsytes. If you’re one kind of person, you immediately want to go into another room away from me, but if you’re the other, you’re excited by the sound of this and you want to hear about my Sims Decades Challenge. The Nobel Committee of 1932 was the second kind, because they gave John Galsworthy the Literature Prize for his work on the Forsytes. The series has been adapted to the screen many times. The version my mom and I watched first, from the turn of the millennium, boasts an excellent cast and a lot of amazing hats, and happens to tell what I found to be a powerful story of changing human relations with a particular astute attention to the suffering of those trapped in unhappy marriages by social mores. Galsworthy takes the rising fin-de-siècle acceptance of divorce in England as a nominal subject and makes it a tool to reveal and at last alleviate the incredible harms done to people who were life-sentence prisoners of miserable marriages.

I’ve only read a few small sections of the Forsyte stories on paper, but I thought the miniseries quite excellent and revelatory in its depiction of how people used to make out while wearing those crazy skirt contraptions. It contains its minor share of titillation, but only because it’s trying to say something about the ways in which Victorian people were horny and what it did to their minds.

Then everything changed when the Yassification Nation attacked.

They found a guy who looks like he grew from Henry Cavill’s armpit to play Soames, canonically an unfriendly rapist. They found a guy who looks like The Beauty and the Beast Beast when he turns human to play Young Jolyon. They cut Young Jolyon’s affair with Hélène the governess entirely, which I take personally. They made Irene a nubile young ballet dancer who immediately makes eyes at Hot!Soames. The original text, as I understand it, is about Irene getting boxed into a marriage she doesn’t want and Young Jolyon ruining his life to get out of…several different marriages he screws up. If the show’s not about that, what’s it about?

It’s about oppressively overshot images of hot people staring blankly at each other while an old lady explains their relationships via thuddingly direct voiceover. It’s about people announcing almost direct-to-camera their motivations and attitudes. It’s about CGI-enhanced British estates with toooooooo much bloom. Forgive me for sounding Boomerian, but indeed what happened to acting, directing, writing, cinematography, you know--the values of the medium? If I can’t trust the British to produce a decent literary adaptation, who can I trust?

No one.

After we noped out of episode one of The Forsytes (2025), we went back to watch the first episode of The Forsyte Saga (2002). It was goofy and stilted and everything you’re thinking of when you hear the phrase “PBS Masterpiece miniseries”. Still great, though. Still so attentive to its stars’ performances and the experiences of their characters, full of archly comic (sometimes unintentionally comic) accounts of Victorian repression. Still deeply sad and compelling, unwilling to entirely condemn even its most unlikable characters or wholly idealize its most sympathetic. If we can ascribe even one positive value to the bourgeois project of the realist novel, it is that ability to consider the fraught and imperfect nature of every one of us, victims of our own context and tragic protagonists of our singular lives.

Or, I don't know, I guess we could be hot in a vacuum. Don't know how the lack of oxygen will treat us in the long term, but I'd probably do better in today's media landscape with a little splash of brain damage.

Man, I said it in the 2025 Retrospective and I should have believed it then: television is over. Even the best shows out today are just asking me to suck the dregs. The Forsytes is less than that.