| | | Television Review
‘Around the World in 80 Days’ Review: An Adventure in Self-Discovery
David Tennant stars in the latest take on the famed Jules Verne novel, a PBS ‘Masterpiece’ presentation.
Ibrahim Koma, David Tennant and Leonie BeneschPHOTO: TUDOR CUCU /PBS
By John Anderson
Dec. 30, 2021 3:50 pm ET
When a classic is remade, the most frequent and frequently irrelevant question concerns how much has been changed from the original. The happy answer regarding the PBS “Masterpiece” presentation of “Around the World in 80 Days”: Much.
Around the World in 80 Days
Begins Sunday, 8 p.m., PBS
You can probably still spend 80 days going around the world if you book on certain U.S. airlines, but in the days of Jules Verne —the grandfather of fantasy fiction, who published his most famous novel in 1872—such a trip was considered not just impossibly fast but beyond belief. As the eight-part series commences in London, an article in the Daily Telegraph is expressing the theory that such a journey is possible. At the luxe Reform Club of London, where the musty all-male membership dines on gelatinous brown soup and boiled beef, the report is dismissed by most members as twaddle. Piffle. Bosh.
Still, “if a man was very well organized and was of a resilient and indefatigable nature and took advantages of recent technological advances,” he could do it, pronounces Phileas Fogg ( David Tennant ), who has never exhibited any of the qualities he’s just cataloged but allows himself to be baited into making the trip. One motivation is the obnoxious Nyle Bellamy (the marvelous Peter Sullivan ), Fogg’s former schoolmate, fellow Reform Club member, and bully. Another is the £20,000 wager he suddenly has with Bellamy that he can, in fact, circle the planet and be back to the club by Christmas Eve. A third—well, there are myriad reasons Fogg needs to do it for himself, including the postcard he’s received that morning, bearing a one-word message: “Coward.”
A scene from ‘Around the World in 80 Days’PHOTO: JOE ALBLAS/PBS
In some ways, this “Around the World in 80 Days,” created by Ashley Pharoah and Caleb Ranson, is a coming-of-age tale, except that the person coming of age is a 50-year-old man. Fogg’s companions, in contrast, are fully realized characters: His well-traveled valet and occasional savior, Passepartout ( Ibrahim Koma ), has been many things, including a thief and burglar; Abigail Fix Fortescue ( Leonie Benesch ) is a firecracker wannabe journalist whose father, Bernard ( Jason Watkins )—another school chum of Fogg’s—owns the Telegraph and doesn’t want his daughter mixed up in this harebrained trip around the world. She goes anyway. And reports back. (Abigail, a Pharoah-Ranson creation, is something of an amalgam—of Fix the detective, who pursues Fogg through the novel, and the celebrated Nellie Bly, whose 1890 book “Around the World in Seventy-Two Days” chronicled the Fogg-beating trip she undertook for Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World in 1889, and during which she met Jules Verne.)
A scene from ‘Around the World in 80 Days’PHOTO: JOE ALBLAS/PBS
Fogg, conversely, is an amorphous creature, good of soul, short of experience, a product of his environment, culture and class: He is a privileged man of his times, who presumes superiority over others until educated otherwise. His just-hatched quality provides considerable comedy, as he learns that the world isn’t upper-class London (although it’s made clear that upper-class London controls much of the world). Mr. Tennant makes him representative of everything the eight-part series seems inclined to be against, and at the same time the most sympathetic of men. The performance is complex, multilayered, internalized to a remarkable degree but also brilliantly theatrical: During the trio’s journey through India, Fogg rescues a young man from the punishments of the British army with a speech about love that seems to arise from nowhere but is one of the more remarkable soliloquies on the subject one is likely to see short of Shakespeare. Thanks to Mr. Tennant, Fogg is above all else endearing, despite his fastidious, punctilious, quavering anxieties.
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