Doctor Zhivago (TV Serial) - Critical Reception

Critical Reception

Alessandra Stanley of the New York Times said, "By trying so hard for authenticity, this Doctor Zhivago drains the story of much of its lyricism.... Mr. Lean's grander, glossier version was a closer match to the romantic spirit of the novel's hero.... The Davies version is engrossing but more for the harrowing scenes set in the civil war after the revolution than for the novel's legendary love triangle. Black-and-white archival photographs - Moscow slums, newspaper shots of soldiers marching off to World War I - are interspersed throughout the film and slowly bleed into a scene of the television show. The visual trick gives the series a quasi-documentary feel and is quite effective. Yet Mr. Davies takes the same liberties with Pasternak's text as the original film did, focusing on the love story and discarding a lot of the politics, secondary plots and literary sidetracks.... This Doctor Zhivago can be watched as a useful history lesson and as a cautionary show business tale: it is a lot easier to adapt a Jane Austen novel than it is to remake a film by David Lean."

Brian Lowry of Variety observed, "Some will rightfully pine for Maurice Jarre's Oscar-winning score, Julie Christie and Omar Sharif, yet this somewhat less epic take on Boris Pasternak's book is a creditable version, featuring outstanding performances and considerable romance. And hey, kids, it sure beats reading the Cliffs Notes."

Tom Jicha of the South Florida Sun-Sentinel called it "a stunning success" and continued, "Davies' screenplay is involving, the cinematography is captivating, the costuming and set designs evoke a sense of time and place, and the top-of-the-marquee performances are world-class." He concluded, "Doctor Zhivago is a hefty production, which demands a four-hour, commercial-free commitment from its audience. But the reward is a richly layered character study and love story, worthy of the franchise under which it airs."

Melanie McFarland of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer graded the series B+ and commented it "manages to maintain true to the main story line, streamlining incidental characters to keep the film from becoming too unwieldy, which takes some effort considering the book's rich language and numerous characters.... Even so, this version, though a little better paced than the original, is still fairly sluggish. Given the book, perhaps that's unavoidable."