[Televisionary]

"A really good detective never gets married." - Raymond Chandler Many detectives would take Chandler's edict to heart, given just how married they are to their jobs, and the bookshelves are lined with detective novels about grim gumshoes who forsake their own personal lives in pursuit of catching killers. After all, detectives are prone to seeing the worst of humanity on a daily basis, of seeing the skull beneath the skin, companions as they are of death and murder. Enter Kurt Wallander (Kenneth Branagh), a detective in the seaside town of Ystad, Sweden who--like many others of his ilk--has his own horrific demons to battle even as he throws himself into chasing criminals with intense abandon. And while we've all seen stories of flawed detectives a zillion times, PBS' Wallander , a co-production between WGBH and BBC which kicks off on Sunday night as part of Masterpiece Mystery , offers a tautly gripping and suspenseful roller coaster ride through the dark heartla

“Nobody ever did, or ever will, escape the consequences of his choices.” - Alfred Montapert In this case, it's not just our own choices that we need fear the consequences from but those of others as well. In Masterpiece Classic 's The Old Curiosity Shop , an adaptation of Charles Dickens' novel that aired in the UK on ITV in 2007, a young girl and her gambling addict grandfather must flee from the titular shop after they are ruined from his debts and are relentlessly pursued by one of Dickens' most loathsome and terrifying villains, the evil and sadistic (not to mention grotesque) Daniel Quilp. The girl in question is The Old Curiosity Shop 's eternally patient and tragic Little Nell ( Becoming Jane 's Sophie Vavasseur), a candidate for sainthood if there ever was one who bears the indignities of her situation with an almost ethereal distance from the grubbiness of the situation at hand. Certainly not helping matters is her self-serving grandfather ( Diamonds &#

"I am the only child of parents who weighed, measured, and priced everything; for whom what could not be weighed, measured, and priced, had no existence." - Charles Dickens, "Little Dorrit" Charles Dickens often wrote about money and his novels gave equal weight to the lives of the poor and downtrodden as they did the idle rich. But none of his novels pushed financial matters to the fore as much as his 1857 novel "Little Dorrit" did. Ostensibly the story of the debt-ridden Dorrit family, the plot centers on young Amy Dorrit, a young woman born in the Marshallsea Prison to a father who has fallen on hard times and spent more than twenty years in the debtor's prison that serves as Little Dorrit's home. "Little Dorrit" is a story of greed, betrayal, and malice... that resonates all the more today, given our current economic crisis. Hell, there's even a fantastically prescient parallel to our own time period's Bernie Madoff in Mr. Mer

I think that, were he alive today, Charles Dickens would have approved of Masterpiece Classic 's new adaptation of Oliver Twist (which aired in the UK in 2007 as five half-hour installments), which launches this Sunday on PBS. Unlike previous adaptations which have remained firmly rooted in the novel's Victorian roots, this Oliver Twist , written by Sarah Phelps ( EastEnders ) and directed by Coky Giedroyc ( Blackpool ) with visual flair, grafts a very modern sensibility onto the typically Dickensian story of the workhouse orphan forced to fend for himself in a London populated by grifters, murderers, and child thieves. It's no surprise that Phelps, who adapted Dickens' novel, has written more than 90 episodes of downtrodden British soap EastEnders ; here she imbues the story with the heightened sense of reality typically found in soaps, boldly structuring the condensed plot into slickly provocative bursts of drama, making it virtually impossible not to get sucked into

Timothy Spall is known for many things: his roles in many of Mike Leigh's films, his turn as Peter Pettigrew in several of the Harry Potter film adaptations, and as a consummate lover of Dickens. Spall had the chance to portray the iconic character of Fagin in the latest adaptation of Charles Dickens' Oliver Twist , which aired in 2007 as five half-hour installments on BBC and which is set to launch this Sunday as part of PBS' Masterpiece Classics ' Dickens season. Speaking at last month's Television Critics Association Winter Press Tour, Spall had quite a lot to say about playing Fagin, why the novels of Dickens have endured more than 150 years later, and, yes, about those Harry Potter films. Spall's portrayal of Oliver Twist 's Fagin, the ringleader of a band of children thieves, is particularly creepy and vastly different than how previous actors performed the role. "I was going for glamour," joked Spall. "He is a creep, he is