This series made me want to weep - at the senseless waste of acting talent and script material. For this is not a TV dramatization of "The Casual Vacancy" by J. K. Rowling. It's a TV dramatization of the Reader's Digest Condensed Version of The Casual Vacancy. What's more, it appears that slashing it down from a full series to a 3 part synopsis was done after filming already started, probably by the director tearing pages out on the set, rather than by intelligent script writers. How else to explain the presence of all the characters from the book, yet no role - not even dialog - for some of them? How else to explain all the setups in Episode 1 that are just left hanging with no follow-up? What does remain is excellent, completely capturing Rowling's characterizations and the petty snobbery of English village life, but the ruthless editing leaves too much out and too many loose ends. There's no exploration of the interaction between children and parents that is core to the book. There's no hint of who is behind the "ghost", a major plot device. Sukhvinder, who has a life-changing experience in the original, is literally seen but not heard. There's no resolution for the dysfunctional Price family. I don't know why the scriptwriters even bothered telling us Gaia's name, since she's reduced to a walk-on extra.
What's left, basically, is an excellent performance from Michael Gambon and Julia McKenzie as the Mollisons. It's worth watching just for that. But that's the tragedy of this series - these are the canonical Morrisons, nobody will ever do it better. And that means the series will never be remade, and the full story will never be told.
