The book’s character of white male Detective Fix (Masterpiece Theatre has enough of those) is now a female journalist (German actress Leonie Benesch)-likely fashioned after intrepid real-life journalist Nellie Bly.
This time around, Shivaani Ghai plays Aouda. In the 1956 David Niven version, Shirley MacLaine plays Indian Princess Aouda in brownface. This freshens and humanizes the story, offering a critique of colonialism where there was once celebration.
The original attitudes in which Verne’s tale was steeped in 1872 and the lingering racism in earlier remakes have been overhauled here. Christian Lundberg’s music is driving, delightful, and great fun. The framing of shots, both sets and CGI, is intentional and artful. The production is gorgeous-Victorian costumes and international settings so lush and detailed you can almost smell the spices of India, the paper and dust of a book-lined London men’s club, and the opulent gardens of Hong Kong. Lest the £20,000 bet sounds less than worth risking one’s life and limb for, it translates to just over $3 million today. Startling himself, Fogg accepts and doubles the bet, acquires two unlikely travel companions, and sets out on a nearly three-month-long adventure-with a ticking clock. Reading a newspaper article speculating that the invention of the hot-air balloon makes it possible to circle the Earth in as few as 80 days, an old school frenemy bets Fogg that it can’t be done.
Who wrote around the world in 80 days series#
The new Masterpiece series on PBS, starring the transcendent David Tennant, reimagines and recasts the central characters and chunks of the narrative in a modern retelling of Verne’s adventure story-which has already been retold many times, including in the classic Academy Award–winning 1956 film.Ī sedentary British bachelor, Phileas Fogg (Tennant) rarely leaves home except for a daily walk to his men’s club, where he eats the same meal each day and eschews anything out of the ordinary. A century and a half ago, Jules Verne wrote Around the World in Eighty Days, and readers began to imagine that the world might be shrinking a wee bit.
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