The Casual Vacancy

The Casual Vacancy is a heartbreaking, thought-provoking if occasionally simplistic look at the tyrannical power of the picturesque.

The Causal Vacancy beautifully weaves together story lines about vivid characters of all social classes and of all ages with funny, heartbreaking and shocking vignettes about the hangups and bossiness of the main players and their children.

The result is a warmer story, streaked with satire rather than marinated in it. Perhaps the greatest contribution comes from the performance of someone who barely appears: Rory Kinnear (best known as the Prime Minister in the pig episode of “Black Mirror”), whose Barry is a poignant, meaningful figure, a do-gooder whose loss is real for the town’s most vulnerable residents.

A three-hour miniseries that bounces between tragedy and comedy with ease.

This Casual Vacancy is a little too earnest, which renders the depictions of the class warfare trite and preachy.... [Abigail] Lawrie disrupts the coziness that occasionally threatens to calcify The Casual Vacancy into another lush, prestigious book-on-film, imbuing it with an authentic cry of the damned.

Like the book, the miniseries can come across less as a believable depiction of a community than as a collection of grotesques, despite the best efforts of its top-notched cast to give their roles three dimensions. The one major exception is Terri's daughter, Krystal, a fully fleshed-out character played to perfection by newcomer Abigail Lawrie. [1 May 2015, p.50]

I appreciated the miniseries’ willingness to reach beyond moral satire. There are glimmers of big cosmic tragedy in this Vacancy, when the camera swings away from two characters arguing (or hooking up) in order to highlight some mythic element in the landscape.

The Casual Vacancy is more interesting than it is enjoyable, an unsparing look at the reality of English country life, not the reverie.

The show sets itself up with a lot of potential, but can’t keep all its plates spinning fast enough or long enough to result in a true spectacle.

Every element that doesn’t quite work in The Casual Vacancy is offset by a legitimate reason to check it out, at least until the muddled ending.

A small town, character-driven drama that’s enjoyable enough even if the characters are not entirely believable.

The Casual Vacancy was riveting while it lasted. When it was over, though, I wanted to stick a fork in my face.

As a television series, The Casual Vacancy stands on its own, but it has only a goblet’s worth of Potter magic.

The performances are fine, the story lines appropriately interwoven. Everything is totally competent.... [But] the details are the story, and simplifying them and sanding them down leaves Vacancy with a real dull streak.

Writer Sarah Phelps has done her best, but short of throwing out Rowling's characters and plot, there was no real way to make The Casual Vacancy bearable.

The story--while it may have been fun to read on paper--is slight and even puzzling on screen.

In the end, this dreary British import proves that the only thing more boring than agitprop drama is someone else's agitprop drama.

By losing the emotional core of the film essentially after the first act--the death of Kinnear's saintly Fairbrother--the film spends the next three-plus hours trying to fill the void. Fools rush in to fill it, but because most of them are treated with such contempt, or pity, none can or possibly could.

Despite its quaint picturesque town backdrop, The Casual Vacancy is an ugly little piece of work, filled with bitterness, sniping, selfishness, and cruelty. There is no character other than Barry who seems remotely appealing or interesting.

It’s far too dreary to be a comedy, and its social commentary is often blunt and ineffective. Worse, the narrative has no momentum, spending three hours on the tedious minutiae of relationships among more than a dozen characters, most of whom are barely fleshed out.

The decision to build out Krystal’s story is one of the best choices of this adaption, giving depth and shading to a story that more often swings from sourness to melodrama.

Despite the treacly smugness, which doesn’t become fully evident until the third episode, it’s easy to get caught up in The Casual Vacancy’s soapy drama and to admire a number of the performances.