Ebenezer Scrooge, a cold and bitter man, despises his fellow human beings, the Christmas holiday and what it represents. On Christmas Eve night, he is visited by the ghost of his dead partner Jacob Marley, who warns him that in order for both of them to be redeemed Scrooge will be visited by three spirits. Over the course of that night, Scrooge will be confronted by visions from his past, present and future in the hope that these experiences will help him to re-connect with humanity, especially his own. In this version, Scrooge and Marley are asset-strippers with extensive industrial interests as well as being moneylenders.
It was announced in November 2017 that the BBC had commissioned a new telling of the Dickens tale, with Steven Knight writing the three-part series. Knight, Tom Hardy and Ridley Scott would serve as executive producers. In January 2019, it was reported that Hardy would also be starring in the series; however, the role he would be playing was not disclosed. In May, Guy Pearce was revealed to be playing Scrooge, alongside the castings of Andy Serkis, Stephen Graham, Charlotte Riley, Joe Alwyn, Vinette Robinson and Kayvan Novak. Rutger Hauer, who was originally cast as Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come, became too ill to film his scenes and was replaced by Jason Flemyng. Filming on the series commenced by May 2019 at Rainham Hall, a 1729-built National Trust site in the London Borough of Havering. In early June filming took place at the Lord Leycester Hospital in Warwick.
Episodes
On the BBC's iPlayer service, episode 1 had 1.6 million requests, episode 2 had 1.03 million requests and episode 3 had 900,000 requests. It was the sixth most watched programme on iPlayer during the Christmas fortnight of 20 December to 2 January.
Reception
Ratings
Episode 1 was the most watched TV show for the entire week ending 22 December in the UK, with 7,330,443 viewers watching within seven days of the first broadcast. The subsequent two episodes failed to register in the top 15 BBC1 broadcasts for week ending 29 December, achieving less than 5,887,097 viewers. According to Deadline Hollywood there were 1.4 million fewer viewers for the second episode on BBC One; representing a 30% drop from the first episode.
Critical reception
reported an approval rating of 54% and an average rating of 6.19/10 from 24 critic reviews. The website's critical consensus reads, "This radical retelling of Charles Dickens' classic parable struggles to justify its oppressive tone and edgy flourishes, although Guy Pearce is suitably haunting as the haunted Ebenezer Scrooge." Pearce's performance received a great deal of praise. Radio Times awarded the miniseries four stars out of five and opined that at times the script "feels more Shakespearean than Dickensian." Evening Standard compared it to Peaky Blinders and praised the performances of the actors. Reception from American outlets was less positive. The Hollywood Reporter described the miniseries as "designed to alienate the Dickens brand's traditional core audience and probably won't much engage the curiosity of more mature viewers." Salon referred to it as a "dispiriting adaptation" calling it "short on joy and very, very, very long on purgatorial slogging." Collider gave it two stars and acknowledged that the miniseries "certainly brings something new to the tried-and-true story" but found the ending "misses out on the meaning of the story and the greater meaning of the Christmas season." Nick Allen of RogerEbert.com also gave it two stars and described viewing it as "approximately three joyless hours of watching an adaptation try to justify its edginess." The A.V. Club gave it a C- rating, remarking on the "unrelenting dourness."
