Amazon Prime VideoCharles Dickens is like William Shakespeare: most of his stories are timeless, and can be transplanted into any setting. Take A Christmas Carol for example: it can be a drama, a motion-capture animated adventure, a 1980s Bill Murray comedy, a musical with Muppets, or a movie where Ti West makes him into a kind of anti-hero, for some reason. But not every story is so universal, and that makes them harder to adapt. A Tale of Two Cities, for example, is set at a very precise moment in time: the best of times, the worst of times, the age of wisdom, the age of foolishness, the epoch of belief, the epoch of incredulity, you know the rest. Basically, it’s the French Revolution. If you don’t count The Dark Knight Rises, the last adaptation of the novel was in 1980. But almost half a century later, an MGM+ series is giving the story its due — and bringing it up to date. If you’ve read A Tale of Two Cities before, it was probably assigned to you in school. That’s the history star and executive producer Kit Harington has with it as well.“I read it for A Level, which in the UK is 16, 17. And Dan West, writer and producer alongside me read it then as well,” he tells Inverse. “He'd had it in our heads for a long time and then came around to throwing a few ideas about and realized that it hadn't had an adaptation in a long time.” While Harington loved reading it for school, he recognizes that not everyone did. “It felt like such a prescient story and such a story that so many people had read back in school and then maybe hated because they'd read it in school. But maybe it’s a nice time to rediscover it.” That’s an understatement. The class tension and unease rippling through both cities, both Paris and London, feels more familiar today than ever. A Tale of Two Cities follows Lucie Manette (Mirren Mack), a young woman who discovers her father is alive after years of being imprisoned in France. She finds out from a young Frenchman, Charles Darnay (Francois Civil), but he quickly gets into legal trouble, and Lucie needs to lean on rapscallion lawyer (and Darnay lookalike) Sidney Carton. Kit Harington and Mirren Mack as Sidney Carton and Lucie Manette in MGM+’s A Tale of Two Cities.Over the course of four episodes, we see the love triangle between Lucie and the two men develop, and as the Reign of Terror picks up yet again, Charles and Lucie again have to rely on Sidney Carton. It all leads to one of the greatest redemption arcs in all of literature, a tale of how far love can really go. But this series does differ from the book and other adaptations in many ways. In the 1980 made-for-TV adaptation of A Tale of Two Cities, The Princess Bride’s Chris Sarandon played both Darnay and Carton, but this series has two different actors with a passing resemblance, which makes their dynamic even more interesting. Lucie is also changed from a young ingenue heroine to an aspiring surgeon who buys corpses on the black market and nurses Darnay back to health. “I think there's a reason this book has not been adapted for a little while, which is it's quite archaic in various ways. And I think you have to make some changes to make sure that it's reflecting to a modern audience what they see in their lives,” Harington says of the changes. “In the book, I feel like Carton is the lead, but in our story, Lucie is very much the lead, and that's purposeful. She is the center of this love story. And when we were casting it, we needed that kind of, for want of a better word, fire and determination and driving force that we'd written her having.” Mirren Mack’s Lucie takes a much bigger role in this series than in the books. | MGM+Mirren Mack is exactly the right choice for this role — still full of wide-eyed innocence, but with a fierce streak that makes Lucie the story engine the show is fueled by. Harington plays the scoundrel parts of Carton so well, and as he reforms, his noble intentions are painted all over his face. Maybe you regard A Tale of Two Cities as an old piece of homework from your teen years, or maybe you’ve never read it at all. Regardless, this series is a brand new take on it, yet one that still feels like a faithful adaptation and a love letter to this historical epic. A Tale of Two Cities streams on MGM+.