Geraghty puts the 2005 BBC adaptation of Bleak House into historical context exploring the history of British television adaptations of classic novels including adaptations of Dickens novels and other adaptations of Bleak House. She puts Bleak House in economic and cultural contexts arguing that the 2005 adaptation must be seen as part of the BBC's attempt to broaden the audience for adaptations of classic novels through its use of narrative strategies, specifically its mix of soap with its character structures, character development strategies, and cliffhanger strategies, through its mixing of the bildungsroman and the mystery, and through its use of new visual strategies, specifically its use of HD cameras, its framing strategies, its camera angle strategies, its almost documentary like quality, and its quick pace, She explores the cultural contexts of Bleak House by focusing on ithe mise-en-scène of Bleak House and its setting, décor, and visual strategies, strategies used, she argues, to underline character traits or to provide secret or hidden information about characters, character relationships, and locational relationships. All of these economic and cultural strategies combined, argues Geraghty, is what puts the classic in the BBC's 2005 adaptation of Bleak House. I am, by the way, not so sure that Bleak House is the classic Geraghty argues it is. It suspect that it takes both time and distance, before we can say what is and what is not not a "classic". And then there is the issue of the social and cultural construction of artistic canons...
I highly recommend Geraghty's monograph to anyone interested in television criticism broadly and adaptations of classic novels for TV more specifically. Though I wished for more mise-en-scène analysis in the final chapter, as opposed to a review of critical responses to Bleak House's mise-en-scène, Geraghty's book provides, in so many ways, a model of how contemporary television criticism should be done.
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