Television series
Little Dorrit
Other titles called Little Dorrit: the 1987 film.
Andrew Davies turns Dickens' sprawling novel about debt, imprisonment and the lies people tell to survive into fourteen tender, funny, occasionally devastating episodes. Claire Foy and Matthew Macfadyen anchor a huge cast moving between the Marshalsea prison and London drawing rooms. It's slow-burn romance wrapped around a surprisingly sharp satire of financial speculation and social climbing.
Should you watch it?
Watch it if you love slow-building Victorian sagas where a crowd of characters, debts and secrets knot together over many hours, and you are happy to let a patient, emotionally generous story earn its payoff.
Skip it if you want a tight, fast plot or a self-contained evening; fourteen half-hour parts take real commitment, and the early stretches can feel like a slow crawl through Marshalsea gates and bureaucracy.
What it asks of you: Fourteen short episodes of about half an hour each, unhurried and character-driven, with a steady rhythm of moral weight and quiet hope rather than sharp spikes of action.
Not sure? Find tonight's pick in a minute.
If you liked this
Bleak House2005
Also Dickens, also adapted by Andrew Davies, and arguably even better paced — it was cut into fifteen-minute instalments to mimic Victorian serialisation, giving it real narrative snap.
But Its plot machinery (a decades-long lawsuit, a huge cast of suspects) asks for more patience than Little Dorrit's more intimate romance.
North & South2004
Same industrial-era class collision and slow-burn courtship, with Richard Armitage doing career-making brooding opposite a headstrong heroine who won't be talked down to.
But It leans harder into swoony romance than social satire — less biting, more yearning.
Downton Abbey2010
If it's the ensemble house full of secrets, class anxiety and slow-moving hearts you loved, this scratches the same itch with more polish and a bigger budget.
But Edwardian gloss and soapy plotting sit a long way from Dickens' grubbier, funnier moral universe.
Not sure tonight? Get a pick in a minute, starting from Little Dorrit
The wildcard
Something you would not have found on your own.
L'Argent1983
Both trace how money moving through a society drags innocent people down with the guilty; L'Argent just refuses you the comfort of Dickens' eventual mercy.
Robert Bresson's final film follows a forged banknote as it passes from hand to hand, each exchange corroding someone's life a little further — the same idea driving Little Dorrit's Merdle collapse, stripped of every ounce of warmth or comedy.
But Bresson's actors barely emote, the pace is glacial, and there's no romance to soften the bleakness — this is Dickens' moral machinery with the humanity sanded off.
People
Cast
Recommended by
Little Women, Bleak House, Middlemarch, Great Expectations, Blandings, Wind at My Back, The Read