In bustling Kingsbridge, a wounded knight going by the name of Sir Thomas Langley ( Ben Chaplin) arrives with a Big Secret he seeks sanctuary by becoming a monk at the local priory.Ĭhronicling the late Middle Ages - the start of the Hundred Years War against France, the devastation of the Black Death, the corrupt machinations of the Church and the peasant uprisings against royal tyranny - Follett’s novel follows four adolescents into adulthood. King Edward II has been deposed, with a push from his scheming French wife Queen Isabella ( Aure Atika), elevating their son Edward III ( Blake Ritson) to the throne.

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).