S1E1 Episode 1

Les Misérables Season 1 Episode 1 aired December 30, 2018 on BBC One as the premiere of Andrew Davies's six-part adaptation - explicitly not a musical, and designed to restore Victor Hugo's novel to the unsentimentalised moral argument the stage production had buried under anthems. The series earned 88 percent on Rotten Tomatoes from 40 critics and a Metacritic of 79, with Collider calling it 'emotional, engrossing - an adaptation that brings newfound intimacy with these outcasts.' The premiere covers Valjean's release from the Bagne of Toulon and his encounter with the Bishop of Digne - the moral pivot on which the entire narrative turns - without softening the Bagne's reality or the Bishop's generosity into easy sentiment. Davies's script establishes the moral argument at full weight within the first hour: Valjean has been made into something by nineteen years of imprisonment, and the Bishop's response to what he finds is the show's entire thesis delivered in a single act. Dominic West performs the character with an exhaustion that reads as genuine rather than theatrical. David Oyelowo's Javert is introduced in the same episode: principled, rigidly legal, and already identified as Valjean's formal mirror rather than his villain.