I can’t really tell you what it’s about or why you will like War and Peace: it’s a 1500-page novel after all, and I can’t get it all down here. Bonaparte, court politics and finance stalk the aging aristocrats in the dens of the ancien régime; simultaneously sex, death, war and marriage pull the younger generation along at a bewildering pace as they try to make sense of it all. The hypocrisy, tangled plot lines and intrigue resemble Game of Thrones, but the thoughtfulness and interesting tone that this BBC adaptation achieves means that a direct comparison doesn’t do this show justice.

The first few episodes are quite steamy, focusing on romance and family intrigue; war and political intrigues are felt only in the reverberations they cause in the lives of protagonists. That’s why Russian critics have dismissed it as “a classic with cleavage” or a “medium budget soap opera.” They needn’t get so jumpy and defensive. In the Soviet version you sat through hours and hours of slow conversations, interminable maroushkas, miles and miles of Soviet army extras, and a lack of good female dialogue. There were (at a rough guess) 100,000 minutes of close-up footage of grim-faced Russian male leads staring into the distance while riding in a carriage. Natasha had all the charm of a scientifically reanimated potato. Meanwhile, the 1950s American version consisted in its entirety of bland glossy actors leering at Audrey Hepburn.

In any period drama it is hard to get us to look past the ballrooms and grandeur. This adaptation avoids that pitfall. Deft camerawork means that we are close but not too close to the action. The script is wonderful, the dialogue contemporary and unpretentious. Lines like, “I feel like everything I say or do or think turns out to be wrong” is neither fanciful nor jarringly overdramatic. With the recent BBC series Dickensian the director jumped from one part of the plot to another and it felt like Eastenders – a sprawling mess. Each episode of War and Peace is neatly self-contained, and we are always left with a cliffhanger. It’s quick but also manages to take the time out for the existential conversations between Pierre and Andrei, or Sonia and Natasha.

Paul Dano (of There Will Be Blood) and Lily James deserve special mention as Pierre and Natasha. Every other version I’ve seen has Natasha as a kind of speechless Lolita: beautiful and dancing and entirely lacking in the brain department. James plays the sensitive young heroine with the force and thought that she deserves. Meanwhile, Paul Dano’s Pierre is passionate, irritating, idealistic and loveable. It’s a very fine turn. The count Ilya Rostov, Marya Bolkonskaya and Vassily Kuragin (his face looks like a wet towel) are great supporting characters and for fans of Jim Broadbent, he’s back and playing Jim Broadbent in this too.

Stylistically it is beautiful: sweeping us past grand pastel eighteenth-century mansions, looking like a row of iced cakes on the snow, into twinkling ballrooms, and through the deep greens, purple-grey mountains and autumnal low lights of the Russian countryside. It’s so well shot you feel you could reach out and ping the crisp morning air with a finger. They have even come up with an earthy Russian-inspired choir to score the work.

I’m personally not a fan of most of the BBC’s Big Project, wide-audience-appeal shows. The Christmas Sherlock episode was the worst episode of any television programme I’ve ever seen: poorly cut, poorly paced, nonsensical, self-infatuated mega-bollocks is about the closest I can get to pouring adamant amounts of scorn on it, and the whole Sherlock series. This show is a cut above. I love it as you can probably tell and I guarantee that you will too. My only criticism is that all the actors are far too beautiful; but I doubt that will put you off.