Press Archive

TV Guide
02 February 2004
by Matt Rousch

Those Forsytes, what a scandal! And the next generation is just as screwed up

With its addictive formula of repressed emotion, unrequited lust and festering secrets, The Forsyte Saga is the ultimate masterpiece. As in Masterpiece Theatre, whose host Russell Baker muses, “Whether or not it’s high literature, it’s certainly a page-turner.”

And, he might add, a first-rate soap opera.

Over three Sundays, The Forsyte Saga, Series II brings the story from last season’s terrific miniseries into the Jazz Age, as the family’s offspring find their own passions thwarted by sins of the past. (The first series, and the original 1967 version, are on DVD.)

“That family is like a disease that spreads,” says Irene, who scandalously married two Forsyte cousins. A recap: Irene first wed the unlovable Soames, Saga’s tragic villain, but fled after he raped her. She later married gentle artist Jolyon, and they live in exile.

Jump a generation, and guess what happens when Soames’ headstrong daughter, Fleur (from his second marriage), meets Irene and Jolyon’s son, Jon?

The torment is delicious as these adorable young pups conduct a clandestine affair, knowing it’s forbidden but never dreaming why. Soames fumes and Irene frets amid the meddlings of an extended family of gossips and scoundrels.

Elevating all of this from guilty-pleasure status are the writing and acting. Damian Lewis (Band of Brothers) gives one of the year’s best performances as Soames: so rigid, so miserable in his frustrated loneliness that he can’t help ruining it for everyone else.

Page-turner? Definitely. Time waster? Hardly.