The Pallisers

In the as yet unwritten annals of American television history, 1976 will be recorded as the year in which the novel came to the home screen in serial form in a big way. Fictional works by such popular authors as Irwin Shaw, Arthur Hailey, Taylor Caldwell, and Anton Myrer were so brought to viewers and—importantly for commercial television—more than paid their way. 1977 began with an independent and more immediately pleasing development, namely the PBS debut of The Pallisers, a 22-part BBC version of Anthony Trollope’s six parliamentary novels. (The first episode, on January 31, was ninety minutes long; the rest will be an hour.)

The Pallisers is about the Pallisers, and perhaps that’s as it should be. The setting is Britain from the early 1860s through the late 1870s. Plantagenet Palliser, played by Philip Latham, is a future Duke and a Liberal Member of Parliament keen, to a comical degree, on currency reform. Lady Glencora M’Cluskie—played by Susan Hampshire, the lovely Fleur of The Forsyte Saga, and so, from the start, more glamorous than the Trollope original—is a wealthy heiress in peril of losing her hand and fortune to rakish Burgo Fitzgerald—until her aunts and Plantagenet’s uncle, the Duke of Omnium, decide to intervene. The story of the resulting Palliser marriage provides the series with its narrative engine, which carries along a rich cargo of sub-plots—political, romantic, and villainous, or all three together. Watching the series is like visiting in paradise.

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Whit Stillman

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In the as yet unwritten annals of American television history, 1976 will be recorded as the year in which the novel came to the home screen in serial form in a big way. Fictional works by such popular authors as Irwin Shaw, Arthur Hailey, Taylor Caldwell, and Anton Myrer were so brought to viewers and—importantly for commercial television—more than paid their way. 1977 began with an independent and more immediately pleasing development, namely the PBS debut of The Pallisers, a 22-part BBC version of Anthony Trollope’s six parliamentary novels. (The first episode, on January 31, was ninety minutes long; the rest will be an hour.)

The Pallisers is about the Pallisers, and perhaps that’s as it should be. The setting is Britain from the early 1860s through the late 1870s. Plantagenet Palliser, played by Philip Latham, is a future Duke and a Liberal Member of Parliament keen, to a comical degree, on currency reform. Lady Glencora M’Cluskie—played by Susan Hampshire, the lovely Fleur of The Forsyte Saga, and so, from the start, more glamorous than the Trollope original—is a wealthy heiress in peril of losing her hand and fortune to rakish Burgo Fitzgerald—until her aunts and Plantagenet’s uncle, the Duke of Omnium, decide to intervene. The story of the resulting Palliser marriage provides the series with its narrative engine, which carries along a rich cargo of sub-plots—political, romantic, and villainous, or all three together. Watching the series is like visiting in paradise.