This is a clearly an accomplished and comprehensive version of Fielding's famous book. I cannot really fault the production nor can I greatly disagree with any of the other highly appreciative IMDb reviews. So why didn't I enjoy it more?
It is not the cast: Max Beesley's Tom is fine; Samantha Morton is an excellent Sophia; James D'Arcy is a surprisingly restrained but still effective Blifil; while Benjamin Whitrow, Brian Blessed, Frances De La Tour, Tessa Peake Jones etc. are all at least as good as past experience of their work lead me to expect.
I think the problem lies in the novel itself. I had to read it as a school text and remember being daunted by its extreme length (it was easily the longest book I had ever tried to tackle up to that time) but I have not read it since then. Given my fading recollections of the book, this dramatisation came as something of a surprise.
I expected a long, rambling, picaresque story, in which we follow dozens of characters over many years, but it actually consists of a childhood prologue setting up the main action, which then centres on a relative handful of characters and takes place over just a few weeks.
The opening episode is feature film length, but it felt longer. It sets up Tom's birth and childhood, his love for Sophia, his rivalry with the treacherous Blifil and culminates in his banishment.
From time to time, Henry Fielding (John Sessions) strolls across the screen, commenting on his own tale. This device helps establish the playful, self-mocking tone of the story, disarms any criticism of its improbable, coincidence-driven plot and is an efficient way to introduce the characters and set up narrative developments.
Unfortunately, Fielding's presence is so conspicuous in this opening episode, and his flippancy is so relentless, that it tended to distance me from the actual drama. I found it took quite a long time for me to start empathising with the characters or care about what was happening to them.
The other episodes are between 50 and 60 minutes and are better paced, so I found them generally more enjoyable. Having set up the story in the first episode, John Sessions becomes less obtrusive and less of a distraction. Even so, I still found the whole series a bit of a let-down.
The problem is that the story which eventually unfolds seems to be 'much ado about nothing'. It consists of little more than the main protagonists, in various groupings, chasing each other from inn to inn, or lodging house to lodging house, and getting into brawls. Eventually, everybody fetches up in London, the frantic pace eases up and the intrigues start to proliferate. In fact, in the last couple of episodes there are so many people lurking behind curtains and hiding in cupboards that the story threatens to turn into a Georgian Whitehall farce.
In the Eighteenth Century, the novel was a revelation. Its earthiness, emotional generosity and amused tolerance of human frailty were seen as welcome antidotes to the self-righteous, po-faced moralising of Richardson and his imitators.
But who reads Richardson today?
I think this may be the problem I have with this series. Once Tom Jones is taken out of its literary and historical context it loses most of its satiric point and purpose.
What is left is a story that is too slight, too broadly farcical, too repetitive and too drawn-out to consistently hold my interest, even in a production as good as this.
