There are adaptations of classics that go wrong by trying too hard to modernize them. They change the way characters behave, update values, soften conflicts, add speeches that never belonged to that society, and end up turning a 19th-century work into something written with a 21st-century mindset. I complain about that all the time, and perhaps that is precisely why I was so surprised to finish A Tale of Two Cities with the opposite feeling: that what was missing was exactly some kind of bridge bringing this story closer to us.

The new adaptation is, in many ways, faithful to Dickens’ spirit. The French Revolution is there with its violence, its excesses and its promise of justice turning into vengeance; the honor of one’s word continues to determine decisions that today can seem almost incomprehensible; and Sydney Carton still moves toward that ultimate sacrifice, choosing to die so that the woman he loves can be happy with another man. It is a huge, unabashedly melodramatic story and, in that sense, profoundly Dickensian. The problem is that all of it remains too emotionally distant.

Not because the emotions themselves have aged. Unrequited love, resentment, injustice, inequality, revenge, guilt and the desire for redemption are still perfectly recognizable. What feels distant is the way the series presents them. There is a constant solemnity in the relationships, the dialogue and even the silences, and that turns potentially very human characters into almost symbolic figures. We understand what is at stake, but we do not always feel it.

Kit Harington is probably the one who best manages to cross that distance. Sydney Carton fits very well with what he knows how to do: the bitter, withdrawn, exhausted man who feels far more than he is capable of expressing. It is impossible not to think of Jon Snow. The lowered gaze, the silence, the guilt, the permanent sense of carrying something too heavy to put into words are all there. Harington is good, but at times it almost feels like watching Game of Thrones in another setting, especially because Sydney and Jon share a certain vocation for silent suffering and, above all, sacrifice.

The difference is that Game of Thrones spent years building a universe in which we emotionally understood why Jon made certain choices. Here, despite all the preparation, Sydney still remains somewhat distant from us. His final gesture is enormous, perhaps even too enormous for a contemporary audience. He does not simply give up Lucie, nor does he simply save Charles Darnay: he decides to die to guarantee the happiness of the woman he loves, exchanging places with another man and consciously walking toward the guillotine. In the novel, that sacrifice completes the arc of a character who has spent much of his life believing it had no value; by giving that life to someone else, Sydney finally gives it meaning. It is beautiful, but also profoundly romantic in the older sense of the word, and perhaps that is where the adaptation runs into its greatest difficulty.

Today, the idea that love might or should culminate in self-sacrifice on that scale feels less naturally heroic than it certainly did to readers of another era. Not because we have lost the ability to understand the gesture, but because our way of thinking about love, individuality, desire and responsibility has changed. Sydney’s sacrifice remains intellectually admirable, yet the series never finds a way to make it emotionally inevitable for a modern audience.

And the same is true of the French Revolution itself. We are watching a society built on extreme inequality, privilege, hunger and institutional violence collapse. None of that should feel distant, because we are living in a world once again marked by the concentration of wealth, social resentment, political radicalization and the ease with which arguments about justice can turn into a desire for punishment. The connection was there, ready to be made, but the series rarely looks for it. Its French Revolution remains too attached to the iconography of the French Revolution: furious crowds, aristocrats, tribunals, guillotines, blood and revenge. It works as historical reconstruction, but not quite as a mirror.

Perhaps that is exactly what bothered me most. I did not want A Tale of Two Cities to put 2026 words into the mouths of 18th-century characters. I did not want Lucie speaking like a contemporary woman, or Sydney explaining his trauma in therapeutic language, or Madame Defarge being turned into an easy modern commentary on radicalization. That would be exactly the kind of anachronism I usually reject. But there is a huge difference between modernizing a classic and making it contemporary.

An adaptation does not need to change Dickens to make us understand why Dickens still matters. That bridge could have been built through rhythm, through the intimacy of the characters, through the way inequality is presented, through political violence, through resentment passed from one generation to another, or even through the story’s central question: what do we do when we are finally placed in a position where we must choose between what we want and what we believe is right? All of that remains current; the series simply never manages to make it feel that way.

Even Madame Defarge, perhaps the character easiest to connect to contemporary discussions, never receives all the complexity she could have had. Her revenge comes from real violence, but grows until it can no longer distinguish between justice and collective punishment. There is a powerful discussion there about the moment when a legitimate cause begins to justify any cruelty, a question that is hardly distant from our society, yet the adaptation prefers to use her mainly as a dramatic mechanism.

In the end, we come back to Sydney. His conclusion still works because Dickens created one of literature’s most powerful images: a man who has spent his life considering himself wasted finally finds something he believes is worthy of that life. Harington understands this and delivers the moment without excess, without needing to turn the sacrifice into emotional spectacle. Sydney knows what he is doing and seems, perhaps for the first time, at peace. It is a good performance and a beautiful ending, but I admired it more than I felt it.

Perhaps that is the best way to sum up the entire miniseries. A Tale of Two Cities respects Dickens, respects its period, respects its melodramatic structure and preserves the moral grandeur of its characters. At a time when so many adaptations seem embarrassed by their original material, that is certainly a quality. But respect alone does not create intimacy, and ironically, after so often complaining about classics being updated too much, I finished this adaptation wishing it had found some way, without changing Dickens, to show why that old story about revolution, resentment, honor, love and sacrifice could still also be a story about us.