The historical backdrop is sketched with a few swift strokes, outlining the royal shakeup as the civil war ends in 1327. How far the uninitiated will get is the question, given that it takes much of the first two hours to sift through the sprawling cast of characters. Readers of Follett’s twin epics are legion and should constitute a core audience for this bid by Reelz to get in on the cable craze for bodice ripping, bloody swordplay and medieval hair extensions. Destroyed and rebuilt according to more intelligent design principles during the narrative’s two-decade course, the bridge provides an emphatic metaphor for the path from calcified, corrupted tradition to progress. While the earlier tome revolved around construction of a cathedral, its sequel hinges on a bridge. Weighing in at 1,100-plus pages, Follett’s novel picks up the folk of the fictitious town of Kingsbridge two centuries on from The Pillars of the Earth, which also was made into an eight-hour miniseries (shown on Starz in 2010).
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