Season 26 - Rebecca (1996-1997)
The 1996-1997 season of Masterpiece Theatre was rare for me in that I caught it entirely. I was taking a year off before college and therefore had time to indulge in my much loved passions of reading and watching miniseries while freaking out about my future. The adaptation of Nostromo starring Colin Firth and A Royal Scandal starring Richard E. Grant were highlights that year. But what I wasn't looking forward to was the season ending remake of Rebecca. This was at the height of my Hitchcock fanaticism and I couldn't comprehend why anyone would remake a classic. Yes, Hitchcock didn't get it 100% right, but you can not deny that Laurence Olivier IS Maxim de Winter. It won best picture at the Oscars! So I planned to boycott the remake. The problem when living with your parents is that they have their own opinions on what they want to watch and seeing some of Rebecca turned out to be unavoidable. What little I saw made me instantly withdraw from the television room. My mom didn't last very long either, despite her love of Diana Rigg. For almost twenty years I shunned this adaptation shuddering from the memory of those few glimpses. So I thought perhaps I should give it a second chance. Maybe Diana Rigg could be a superior Mrs. Danvers? Perhaps the beauty of Manderley would be done more justice in color with it's lush abundant floral growth? Or perhaps I should have trusted my gut reaction and avoided this piece of crap entirely. What is striking about this adaptation is they have assembled some of the most talented actors in the British Isles and beyond and somehow sucked the life out of them. If it weren't for Faye Dunaway and Jonathan Cake I don't think a single line would have been uttered above a dull monotone. Rebecca is full of emotion and passion, both repressed and on full display, and yet here it comes across as the most flat and emotionless story ever. It should be turbulent and forceful like the sea, not fake and false like that shitty shack that was slapped together on the beach. After the first episode my dislike became more and more audible. Three hours and nothing went right. I kept making myself step back and think, if I hadn't read the book would I enjoy this? The answer was no time and time again. While the heavy-handed foreshadowing might have been driving me loopy, if Du Maurier was still alive I know what she'd hate most... they made this adaptation into a romance. Yes, there are romantic elements in Rebecca, but that is NOT what the book is. The moniker of "Romance Writer" hung around Du Maurier's neck like a millstone her entire life. To have her greatest novel reduced to being nothing more than a romance? No. She would have snapped. Plus, I like Charles Dance very much, don't get me wrong, but to see him groping and pawing awkwardly at Emilia Fox's cheek and sucking her face so that it looks like he's eating her. Eww. The book STRONGLY hints that the de Winters had a sexless marriage and yet here the demonstrative affection is overwhelming. It's the exact opposite of the book, yet oddly passionless. In the end one would hope that at least Emilia Fox was getting a kick out of playing a role her mother played almost twenty years earlier. And at least it appeared that Diana Rigg was having fun. At least someone was.
OK, I know with what I'm about to admit everyone is going to be shocked, but until this miniseries I had not heard of or watched the original movie adaptation of Rumer Godden's book that is a classic starring Deborah Kerr. Black Narcissus won Oscars and accolades when it was released in 1947, eerily on the day that would be my birthday come the seventies. So, putting aside my lack of a complete film education, what it meant was I was going into this series fresh. In fact I saw an ad only a day before it aired and it was being touted as Diana Rigg's last appearance, that is until Edgar Wright admits defeat and releases Last Night in Soho to streaming, so I said, let's see what this Black Narcissus is all about! Also I have probably rightly pissed off Edgar Wright now by not knowing this movie and saying that movie theaters are dead and streaming is the only safe option in this day and age. Oh well, I'm still looking forward to Last Night in Soho... So this version of Black Narcissus, compared to no other, was a wonderful little idyll of nuns trying to do good against all odds in a very haunted place. I mean this miniseries just oozed Gothic vibes, it was delicious! I constantly love how the building blocks of what is considered Gothic can be changed time and time again to create a whole new slant that you'd never think of. Nuns tend to align themselves more with the horror genre, and to tackle their desires and damnation in a human and real way within the Gothic sphere felt fresh to me, and again note I haven't seen the original film. Though the driving force of the three episode miniseries is Sister Ruth and her going more and more off the rails in this remote location. I don't know if you're supposed to hate Sister Ruth and long for her corruption and death, but I totally did. Her obsession with the male caretaker, Mr. Dean, and her delusions about Mr. Dean and Sister Clodagh make her more and more unstable and I loved every minute of it. I think this was all enhanced by the performace of Aisling Franciosi as Sister Ruth. I knew I knew her from somewhere and wherever that was I hated her in that. Turns out it was The Fall, the Gillian Anderson/Jamie Dornan show, which is, in my mind, the most overrated piece of shit I have ever watched. It is easily one of the worst shows I've ever seen and wish I could forget I ever saw it. Anyway, Aisling was the shitty teenager in love with the father of the kids she babysat and who knew he was a killer and was all OK with that. So yeah, I liked seeing her suffer in this. But does that say more about me or Black Narcissus?
Death in Castle Dark by Veronica Bond
Murder Always Barks Twice by Jennifer Hawkins
Escape to Honeysuckle Hall by Rebecca Raisin
Her Heart for a Compass by Sarah Ferguson
A Lesson in Vengeance by Victoria Lee
Where the Truth Lies by Anna Bailey
If you've only seen the Gillian Anderson adaptation of 
January tenth of this year marked the fiftieth anniversary of Masterpiece, no longer Theatre, but still Theatre in my heart. If you watched the "special" hosted by Alan Cumming you were probably just as baffled as I was that it was nothing more than an infomercial for their most recent seasons without touching on the glorious history and the wonderful shows they have aired over the past fifty years. Let's just do a really fast montage of the hosts to prove that it wasn't the biggest mistake of our lives firing Russell Baker, OK? Sigh. In fact the very touching tribute to Diana Rigg at the end of the second episode of All Creatures Great and Small this season was longer than the tribute to past hosts in a special about the show's history! My quibbles aside, Masterpiece didn't just change television, it changed me. It informed everything about me growing up. It was a touchstone, there every Sunday night, where I could get respite from the world and escape into a show before the onslaught of Monday morning. The theme music was used as the processional music for my eighth grade graduation. I have spent more hours than you can count going through shelves at used bookstores to find the old tie-in editions with the beautiful poster art that Mobil produced for each show. I learned about new shows wandering bookstores and seeing the newly released tie-ins for the upcoming season. I have found more favorite authors than I can count because of this show! 
