YMMV / A Christmas Carol (2019)

• Anvilicious:
  • The miniseries's liberties taken with the original story to provide the real-life subtext to the events such as the Grenfell Tower fire and other contemporary political scandals are not exactly subtle, but they are certainly important messages to keep the story's overall themes relevant for modern viewers.
  • Feminist messages are prevalent, with the female characters being portrayed as more saintly than the males. Lottie holds a pedophile at gunpoint to save her brother and Mrs. Cratchit is implied to be a defender of women who punishes men for how they treat women as it's implied that she summoned the ghosts to punish Scrooge for making her prostitute herself to save her family and then keeping her husband in his service by threatening to tell him what Mrs. Cratchit did.
• Alternative Character Interpretation:
  • Are the ghosts sent on the behalf of purgatory to help Marley and Scrooge atone or are the ghosts instruments of Mrs. Cratchit's curse?
  • Is The Ghost of Christmas Past sympathetic to Scrooge when he showed him his sister using a gun to save him from his headmaster or is he shaming a young, traumatized Scrooge for becoming just as bad as his headmaster by not seeing what she did for him?
  • Is Marley denied a peaceful afterlife because he's a terrible person or was he denied a peaceful afterlife because he's a vital pawn in Mrs. Cratchit's curse?
• Broken Base: Some audiences praised the series for trying new things Dickens story while still maintaining a foothold in the original. Others called it out for being too dark and depressing.
• Diagnosed by the Audience: Scrooge is clearly traumatised by the abuse his father and the headmaster inflicted on him, and has flashbacks that might be a sign of PTSD. He also counts everything (often out loud to himself as if he can't even help it), memorises numbers to an obsessive degree (such as the total income and expenditure for every year that he's run his business), and when he's counting out the coals in the first episode he seems overly concerned about the smudges they leave, leading several reviewers and fans to suggest he might have OCD or similar.
• Fashion-Victim Villain: As one commenter on YouTube put it, Marley here resembles a guy in chains more than a tortured soul.
• Moral Event Horizon: Scrooge's "greatest act of evil" is when he exploits Mary Cratchit's need for money to pay for Tiny Tim's medical treatment. He promises to give her the money if she performs sexual favors for him, to which she agrees. Once she strips down, he tells her to put her clothes back on and take the money because it was all just an experiment to see if she'd go through with it. From there, he threatens to tell Bob what happened if Bob ever thinks about quitting so that he can keep Bob under his thumb for life. This act is so heinous that one can't help but feel that Scrooge doesn't deserve redemption, a sentiment to which Scrooge himself agrees.
• Narm: In general, the show is trying so hard to be Darker and Edgier that it winds up becoming comedic. This is observant from the very beginning, as the idea of someone not only pissing in Jacob Marley's grave, but it waking up his sleeping corpse is just so over the top, it's quite hard to take it seriously.
• Retroactive Recognition: Scrooge's nephew Fred is played by an unusually clean-shaven and curly-haired Adam Nagaitis, probably best known as the scheming Mr. Hickey of The Terror.
• Shocking Moments: The opening scene where Marley's grave is peed on. That alone should let you know just how dark this adaptation is. And that's not getting into Scrooge's sister wielding a gun against Scrooge's headmaster.
• Tear Jerker: Shortly before the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come comes, Lottie and Scrooge sit down in the churchyard. Scrooge tries to thank her for saving him from the headmaster who molested him but he's been so traumatized from the experiences of both his past and the events of that night that he Cannot Spit It Out. Guy Pearce plays the moment with such pathos and ethos that you can't help but feel sorry for him.
• Too Bleak, Stopped Caring: This adaptation of the classic story is so grim, and its Scrooge is so evil, that it becomes difficult for the viewer to actually care whether or not he learns a lesson.
• Unintentionally Unsympathetic: While Scrooge is clearly not supposed to be seen as the good guy before his Heel–Face Turn, his moment listed under Moral Event Horizon makes him come across as just plain evil, far worse than any other version of the character, which greatly hurts his redemption arc.

---