Every day at precisely 10, Fogg goes to the calcified Reform Club and debates the news of the day with his fellow aristocrats every day he eats the same calcified lunch of boiled beef and brown Windsor soup and every day he returns to his cavernous home and his calcified butler and the cycle repeats. It’s a story with a ticking clock literally in the title and yet this adaptation is largely devoid of adventure or fun and doesn’t work nearly well enough as serious drama to compensate.įor those who don’t, in fact, remember the plot of Around the World in 80 Days from previous adaptations, it’s the story of Phileas Fogg (David Tennant), a dour elitist with no sense of life’s purpose. Creators Ashley Pharoah and Caleb Ranson, plus director Steve Barron, have occasional insights into making the context of the book - a familiar title probably best known to current audiences from previous adaptations rather than the book itself - feel relevant, but they’ve lost any sense of what ought to be a narrative with a propulsive momentum. on PBS under the Masterpiece banner, captures some of the bittersweet undercurrents of Phileas Fogg’s life and quest. The new eight-episode adaptation, produced through an alliance of European TV entities and airing in the U.S. Like I said, whatever is a modern reader to relate to in Around the World in 80 Days? Even before the added encumbrances of COVID safety (to say nothing of post-9/11 security), we’d made fast, comfortable, accessible travel as fantastical as journeying to the center of the earth or the depths of the ocean.Ĭast: David Tennant, Ibrahim Koma, Leonie BeneschĬreated By: Ashley Pharoah and Caleb Ranson, from the book by Jules Verne We make jokes about a California bullet train instead of constructing a California bullet train.
We had planes that went New York-to-London in 3.5 hours, but we stopped using them. We have all the knowledge of the world on thin slabs in our pockets, but we stopped actually going to the moon 50 years ago. One thing I’ll acknowledge about the endeavors of Jeff Bezos, Rupert Murdoch, Scrooge McDuck and Elon Musk is that at some point, our technological advancements stopped looking outward.
I get why it might be hard for contemporary audiences to relate to Jules Verne’s 1873 novel Around the World in 80 Days, a saga of wealthy individuals so isolated from the realities of their time that they propose travel challenges that benefit only themselves at a price tag that could cure global hunger, expecting all of humanity to genuflect.
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