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i feel dirty now

Nothing makes me even the slightest bit curious about what they're like.

Love Actually set in Victorian times? No thank you.

kapow!

I made Sam watch Mary Bryant (sp?) once.

it was alright, but i think we'd both be happier using the 6 hours it takes to watch the whole series doing our own things - she can watch that, i'll watch babylon 5 ta very much.

Mebbe he could watch on laptop with headphones whilst she watches on tv or vice versa?

fapo

I'll watch some Dickens adaptations but that's about it, if they count, he'll vaguely watch/surf at the same time and make comment about bonnets and such...

They seemed to be based around this absurd belief that time actually moved slower in the past - the placing tends to be a bit laborious and they're too often a bit worthy.

I think brilliant period dramas can be made but they often don't seem to be.

I want more adaptations of 19th Century Russian literature, or French. Not Dickens, Austen and Hardy by candlelight, with lots of prop hay everywhere.

Love these submissive vacant bints in corsets and dowrys and... 'oh, Mr Darcy, why I would care for a wander...'

I don't get it at all

because they've all got that fucking bint Kiera Knightley in them!

But seriously, as much as I love 19th Century Russian literature (Dostoevsky, Gogol, Tolstoy being my faves) I'd hate to see adaptations made from them. They'd turn something like The Brothers Karamazov into smoochy, morally-persuasive, sentimental drivel like most TV dramas.

What I think most men hate is the prim, unfunny, fairly vapid BBC Pride and Prejudice-esque stuff. If we're gonna watch insubstantial fluff we'd rather it was about killing bad guys, blowing shit up, etc...

That said, Amadeus and Barry Lyndon are two of my favourite films, just to name a couple of examples. But then, they're not really the kind of thing that springs to mind when you say "period drama".

But ill watch the crime and most other ones.

if so, then yes. Yes I do.

I usually like the books and stuff, but I don't watch tv.

I liked Atonement. And I liked the old adpation of Brideshead Revisited

but it's pretty disapointing sometimes. Tess of the durbervilles was shit but i don't think you can maintain the wonderfulness of thomas hardy on screen. Austen tends to televise pretty well. I always think she'd have made a really good playwright, which would make Mansfield Park really ironic hehehe. Before I'd read any Austen i thought it was terrible and pointless, so yeah, men should give her a go.
I thought Little Dorit was good apart from the very last scene. Bleak House from a few years ago was completely ace.

I know some men who really like Austen and my dad watched Bleak House with me. The one time i watched something like this with my boyf, he left the room.

Too much over-acting. Not enough Dinosaurs, explosions or exploding dinosaurs.

Good:
Cranford (BBC version)
John Adams (the one on More4)
Pride and Prejudice (BBC version)
Sense and Sensibility (Film)

Bad:
Heartbeat (vom)
Poirot (only plus point is the Art Deco)
Lark Rise To Candleford (fucking awful. It’s like the turd on the bottom of Cranford’s shoes)

The problem I have is that too many adaptations just depend on an imagined utopian past as a setting with no attention paid to characterisation or plot.

the only things i'll watch that are set in that period are history documentries.

Maybe i wouldn't mind them if they were on occasionally, but it seems like the BBC has to show one of these every sunday night or the world will implode.

my mother loves them. she would though, she's a GIRL

Period? Dramas?

THis thread is a massive letdown

I think it says a lot about the laziness and lack of imagination of the genre that when you say period drama, people immediately think mincing ladies in corsets swooning. Or maybe I'm alone in that, I dunno.

Anyway, surely a drama set in a time away from ours is a period drama, right? If this is true, let us now consider Deadwood - one of the greatest TV series ever. Or Rome, which was not okay, I guess. There are other interesting periods which need dramas - but I guess the BBC only have the budget for those periods involving bonnets. Shame.

and to my dismay I bloody loved them

TV drama, so that's out.

It's pretty much a no to cinematic period dramas too, but I enjoyed Marie Antoinette with the Dunst. I'm aware of it's factual innaccuracies, but I'm not fussed. It wasn't supposed to be a documentary.

by and large.

love beyond anything Pride&Prejudice (original series), went on a trip to the stately home which was used as Pemberley. twas awesome.

i always manage to miss the BBC ones annoyingly.

the recent Jane Eyre was really good. and not just that fish out of timewater one with wasser-po-face.

If Rome counts, i liked that too.

Sense and Sensibility - good
Persuasion - good
Emma - ok

i can't think of anymore, cos there are loads.

maybe it's the sense of oldskool romance, the gentlemanly men, fighting for their women and being all gentlemanly about it. blah blah.

There's not enough 'Mad women in the attic' twists in modern literature.

and here's the basic plot of them all:

one or more ladies are trying to get married before they get old
someone has lost their inheritance
there's a grumpy man
there's a funny fat woman
bad things happen
a mysterious benefactor arrives and gives them lots of money
everyone is happy