Great news for those of us deprived of BBC America, or more esoteric video shops. This highly-hyped miniseries based on Mervyn Peake's classic of gothic fantasy (mainly based on the middle of the trilogy, I think) will be on PBS on June 27 and 28.

My local listings have it at 9pm-11pm over two nights.

The notices for it were mixed (it's a massive novel to adapt) but it should be interesting. I really enjoyed the books when I read them last year and will definitely have my VCR ready.

More information on the series here:

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/gormenghast/home.html

If you go to the PBS home page, and enter your zip code, you can get your local schedule listings at http://www.pbs.org.
(Most stations have their schedules linked there.)

In Southern California (KCET) the showings are at the end of the month:

Wednesday, June 27, 9:00 p.m. (Pt. 1)
Thursday, June 28, 9:00 p.m. (Pt. 2)
Sunday, July 1, 3:00 p.m. (Pts 1 & 2)

Cast: Jonathan Rhys Meyers, Ian Richardson, Christopher Lee, Celia Imrie, John Sessions, Neve McIntosh, Spike Milligan, June Brown, Zoe Wannamaker

Sounds awesome...

This is a ^ for the people interested. It may be hard to see in the future, so watch this while you can! It's considered a literary masterwork and a milestone in the fantasy genre!

Hey, Jepthah, I'm being picky (what's new?) but do you think because a book is a literary masterpiece then one should necessarily watch the televisual adaptation?

Of course, it is made by the BBC so you will be in for a visual treat regardless. Keep a look out for all the character actors who have played, or will in future play, despicable villains in US blockbusters (Or eccentric types in Four Weddings clones!)

I didn't watch the show when it screened here; too little time and I expect it will be repeated. I also failed to complete Peake's trilogy many moons ago: it went particularly weird in volume three and I became distracted! I'm sure I'll get back to it one day!

I'm only interesting in seeing what the BBC did with it. I expect some things to be grand and other things to be far, far away from what I envisioned when reading the books.

Worst that can happen is that 4 hours of my life go bye-bye...

Being a PBS employee, I should mention that the reason programs like this aren't shown that often on PBS is for two reasons:
1) the cost
2) the local station feels they need to appeal to the "traditional" PBS audience (age 50+)

Both of these reasons bug me, because I believe PBS needs to appeal more to younger viewers, but I'm not high enough at my small station to make a difference. So if you LIKE this type of program, contact your local station and let them know! Tell them you like it, you want more, and if you can afford it, support the station!

PBS still caters to the older crowd because, percentage wise, they make up a larger part of the audience AND a larger percentage of that group gives money. And unfortunately, $$ is often a deciding factor in the eyes of many station general managers.

Many stations have a viewer comment phone line to call and an email comment line. At the very least, let them know you like this stuff.

Ok, off my soapbox. Thanks for listening.

i've never read the books, or even heard of them for that matter. i did watch the film though. it was pretty good, although the steerpike character was a bit over dramatic. it felt like the actor was trying a little too hard. i'd like to heard what some people who read the book thought of the series. were the characters how you imagined them as you read the book? are there plans to do the other books now? was this the first in a trilogy?

Nothing adapted for film or TV will ever be as good as the books. It's as simple as that. However, there were some very nice things in the series--they got some things feeling 'right' to me and my personal vision of Gormenghast.

And I'm in loooooooove with Neve McIntosh (Fuchsia). Too beautiful to play the literary description of Lady Fuchsia, but I didn't care!

The series was based on the first two books of the trilogy--"Titus Groan" and "Gormenghast" (and heavily compressed, out of necessity to make a 4-hour mini). "Titus Alone," the third book, would arguably be even HARDER to adapt than the first two; however, I think all three are well worth reading, but you need patience. All told about 1000 pages!!!