ABSTRACT:

Our Mutual Friend – 3 ½ stars

“Our Mutual Friend” is the best kind of TV, the kind that makes you want to go to the library to check out the book from which it is made.

It’s the kind that is so marvelously cast, you don’t mind having those faces and voices firmly implanted in your mind as you open the 900-pager that was the last – and many say best – novel completed by Charles Dickens.

What took “Masterpiece Theatre” so long to bring us this quite modern and sprawling saga that deftly balances caustic social comment, vivid documentary, intelligent soap, lurid schemes and nearly every variation on the theme of love?