'The Hardacres' Season 1 Finally Crosses the Pond to Debut on BritBox

CL Skelton's two novel opus, The Hardacres Saga, is one of those novels that you could have sworn someone made a period drama adaptation of already, but you would be wrong. That's partly due to an accident of timing; the original novel debuted in 1976, and the sequel, Hardacre's Luck, in 1984, making them far too recent for Masterpiece Theater to consider co-producing with the BBC, but too expensive to be made solo. By the time budgets began expanding enough for the novels to be done properly, the once-popular duology had fallen out of recent memory.

(Until the "Theater" part of the title was dropped, there was a strict rule that novel adaptations had to be of works at least 25 years old for Masterpiece to consider them, which is also why the original All Creatures Great & Small was not aired under the Masterpiece banner in the 1980s.)

It was the success of All Creatures as a co-production between Channel 5 and Masterpiece that brought The Hardacres around again as a sensible follow-up series for cozy viewing. We here at Telly Visions have been frankly puzzled as to why Masterpiece has not been all over the series, considering CEO Suzanne Simpson has noted the lack of old-school style period dramas coming from the U.K. as a reason for there being fewer of them on PBS. However, rescission occurred, and now The Hardacres have a home... on BritBox.