Did anyone catch this retrospective Sunday night? Our PBS station is having a pledge drive, and showing snippets of this great series isn’t a bad idea. The top 12 are from voters.
Upstairs Downstairs
The Forsyte Sage
I, Claudius
Bleak House
Prime Suspect
The Jewel in the Crown
Poldark
House of Cards
Reckless
The Fortunes & Misfortunes of Moll Flanders
Wives and Daughters
Jeeves & Wooster
I haven’t seen most of these. For many years, we only had one TV and someone else controlled the remote.
Do you agree with the voters? I’d put Elizabeth R and The Six Wives of Henry VIII in there, and Daniel Deronda, and He Knew He Was Right, and Carrie’s War, but I definitely agree with the first four.
I haven’t seen some one the list. Of what I have seen I think the list is pretty good. But I miss Elizabeth R and The Six Wives of Henry VIII. The latter is the first show I remember viewing on PBS.
I liked The Way We Live Now too. I was surprised at how timely it was. I love the actress who played the daughter but haven’t seen her in anything else. Is that her real voice?
I have the Forsyte Saga, the book, but the size is intimidating. Anyone know if it’s a good read?
The woman who played the daughter in “The Way We Live Now” also played Moaning Myrtle in the Harry Potter movies. And, yes, her natural voice is similar to that, if not so, ah, shrill all the time. Here’s a YouTube video of a scene between her and Rufus Sewell in a recent modernization of “The Taming of the Shrew.” Cannot wait for that to make its way to the US.
I haven’t seen most of the shows listed in the OP, but I’m currently waiting for most of them to make their way through my Netflix queue. The ones I have seen (Moll Flanders, Forsyte, Upstairs, Prime Suspect) were excellent. If “North & South” has been shown on MP, then it needs to be on the list, as well.
It seems a bit of a cheat to put all of the episodes of Prime Suspect on the list, though, since there are so many of them.
It’s always difficult comparing something you saw recently with something you watched decades ago. Given the duration of MT, it seems this list is quite slanted to recent productions. I should track down copies of I Claudius and Up/Dawn to see how well they hold up.
From the list, about all I have to add is that I’m not a fan of Prime Suspect, and poldark didn’t do it for me. Also, tho I love Jeeves and Wooster, I did not think of those as an MT production.
I’ll have to shoot over to the MT site and see if anything jogs my memory about any other contenders.
I, Claudius was awesome. I rewatched it recently on DVD from Netflix.
I liked The Jewel in the Crown at the time.
Looking back at the episodes shown, I was shocked to see that Brideshead Revisited was not shown as part of MT. I guess we must have seen it independently on PBS. I would have nominated that as a top entry.
My all time favorite MT entry was To Serve Them All My Days. I own that on DVD; I rarely purchase what can be rented.
I also notice that A Piece of Cake is not listed. I’ll have to dig those tapes out and see if that was MT. If so, then the official listing might be deficient.
I won’t say I loved everything they did, but I certainly was usually happy with sitting down and watching on Sunday nights. I’m not sure why I stopped, but I did about 1986, and never got back in the habit. Pity.
Danger UXB was one of my favorites left off the list as well as The Dutchess of Duke Street and The Pallisers. Also A Town Like Alice and the various Sharpe series were good.
As did many others. In our local broadcast (WVIZ, Cleveland), there was a brief recorded appearance by Anthony Andrews to say that “Brideshead” had actually come in seventh in the voting, but it wasn’t originally broadcast as part of MT.
I’d only ever seen #5, 8 and 12, each of which I thoroughly enjoyed. The Heiress is a big fan of 2 and 7, which I didn’t watch.
I was disappointed that there wasn’t more attention paid to Alastair Cooke and Russell Baker, who’d hosted MT for so long. Also, unless I missed it, nothing was said about “Mystery!” being spun off from MT, or what’s become of it nowadays. Its remake of du Maurier’s Rebecca was outstanding, as were most of the Jeremy Brett Sherlock Holmes episodes, of course.
In the 70s I watched it as a kid with my parents. Then my wife and I watched it off and on during our fist years of marriage. But we really got back into it the last 5 years or so, when my teens really took a shine to it. My eldest is now away at college, and says MT is the only TV show she makes a point to watch regularly.
Once in a while you get something right as a parent despite the odds!
