First serialized in 1844–46, Alexandre Dumas’s epic tale of injustice, revenge, and subtle intrigue The Count of Monte Cristo (written with collaborator Auguste Maquet) has never lost its irresistible hold on bold romantics. Its wronged hero, Edmond Dantes—falsely accused of treason, arrested on his wedding day, and imprisoned for 15 years in a desolate cell on an island chateau until he makes his escape—is as protean a figure in the imagination as the immortal Sherlock Holmes, a prodigy of will and wile. At eight episodes, the PBS Masterpiece Theatre production, directed by Bille August, doesn’t rush through the high points of the story and kick up a lot of mud (as most movie adaptations do), but allows the elaborate schemes to play out until the traps are sprung and Parisian society convulses. As Dantes, who reinvents himself as the enigmatic Count of Monte Cristo, Sam Claflin delivers a career-defining performance, his charisma not hurled about in histrionic flurries but contained within a watchful, coiled attention that makes his small courtesies and faint smiles seem all the more weaponized–for we, the viewers, know the rage banked behind them. One of Dantes’s betrayers is played by Blake Ritson, whose wagging Chaplinesque eyebrows will be familiar to viewers of The Gilded Age; here, as there, he extracts maximum wit from the tiniest of vain mannerisms. As Dantes’s cellmate and tutor Abbe Faria, Jeremy Irons is a literal godsend. We hear Irons’s unmistakable voice before he pokes his head through the prison wall and his entrance is worthy of applause. —Jim Wolcott