It’s too bad that the new six-episode BBC/FX production of Great Expectations now playing on Hulu is so stupid. Charles Dickens’s novel is such an insightful study of class-climbing ambition – and the human wreckage it creates — it seems to me there are ways to adapt it that would make its relevance more than clear to contemporary audiences. But as it stands, David Lean’s haunting 1946 film version is still the one to beat.

If you don’t know the novel, it’s about a working-class orphan named Pip who’s being raised in desolate marsh country by his abusive, much older sister and her benevolent blacksmith husband. Pip gets taken up at random by the local rich woman named Miss Havisham, a mad recluse and jilted bride who still lives in her tattered wedding gown. “I sometimes have sick fancies,” she says in the understatement of the century, and her newest fancy in hiring a local boy to come to her decaying mansion is, “I want to see someone play.”

So on a whim, the boy Pip gets swept up into the world of wealth and lunacy. He gets dropped by Miss Havisham a few years later, with an equal lack of ceremony, at the time when he’s about to begin his apprenticeship as a blacksmith. And that might have been the end of it except for one thing — Miss Havisham’s lovely adopted daughter, Estella. She’s the little jewel in the rotting refuse of Miss Havisham’s gloomy mansion, getting polished to a higher gleam of brilliance every day. Miss Havisham has recognized in Estella the means to “avenge herself on all the male sex” by creating the perfect heartbreaker, the ideal representation of desirability, a beautiful young woman with all the trappings of wealth — the splendid clothes, the delectable accomplishments, all the acquired airs and graces that money can buy. She’s an icy coquette in training: she’ll warn Pip frankly in adulthood that she has no heart, which was lost in childhood.