So I'm strolling the aisles of my favorite high-end boutique retailer  .. . Costco . . . the other day, and I spy a dozen or so DVDs of the 2001 BBC production of Anthony Trollope's The Way We Live Now, which I remember reviewing way back when. A tale of social-climbing, pretense, greed, and financial fraud on an epic scale, the film was damn good fun. Eight years ago, of course, we could all sit in our over-leveraged McMansions with our three leased SUVs, planning spring break in Biarritz, and laugh at those silly Brits of the 1870s.

I mean, how over-extended and clueless could they get?

As far as I can tell, PBS has no immediate plans to re-broadcast, The Way We Live Now, although God knows its storyline could not resonate any louder than in 2009 U.S.A.

But someone at the (taxpayer-supported) BBC had some kind of inkling of what was heading our way--maybe they met Joe Cassano and a few of his AIG Financial Products sharpies at an upscale Mayfair pub one night--because the winter-spring series of films of great Charles Dickens novels includes Little Dorrit, which begins a five-week run tomorrow night (8 p.m., TPT, ch. 2). It includes many of the same storylines and sub-plots as Trollope's masterpiece, which, like Dickens's, was originally published as a serial, albeit twenty years after Little Dorrit . . . amid yet another round of financial scandals.

I won't pretend to have read the Dickens novel. But like most more or less college-educated Americans, I have heard of it and was vaguely aware that it was inspired by Dickens's father's years in a debtor's prison . . . where, a bit like VISA and MasterCard jacking up interest rates to increase the likelihood of default and suppress consumer spending . . . the over-extended were sent to prevent them from working to pay off their debts. Dickens was supposedly humiliated by the whole experience. But not so much that Little Dorrit is any kind of populist manifesto for the nobility of the poor and injustices inflicted on them by the wealthy.

Huh uh. What makes Dickens so damned entertaining and timeless is that although he was a shrewd judge of commercial subject matter, he rarely lets sentimentality cloud his depiction of the vanities, shifting dimensions, and intensely reactive nature of his fellow humans.

For a fuller synopsis of the sprawling tale, I recommend the original BBC link. But in short, the titular character, Amy Dorrit, is one of only a spare handful of truly decent characters in the whole story. Devoted to her father, the imprisoned debtor William Dorrit (played by Tom Courtenay, whom I don't think I had seen in thirty years), she is smitten by the appearance of Arthur Clennam, a businessman just returned to London after twenty years in the Orient with his late father. Clennam's tyrannical housebound mother has hired Little Dorrit as a seamstress/assistant in her astonishingly decrepit old house.

Arthur correctly deduces that his cold, calculating mother has some specific reason for hiring this particular young woman and begins sleuthing out a relationship between the destitute Dorrits and his own reasonably well-to-do family.

Mixed in with all this, amid the claustrophobic and labyrinthine back alleys of 1850s London, are two dozen deliciously drawn characters, not the least among them is a charming French serial killer Rigaud, the film's single best character; the snorting debt collector Mr. Fankes; the Bernie Madoff-like super-businessman/"Man of the Ages" Mr. Merdle; and a half dozen far-snakier-than-their-doltish-mates women forever conspiring and maneuvering for social position.

Dickens's forte was always the reversal of fortune. Here we get reversals of reversals, which allows him to repaint those presumed to be noble as vain and petty as the monied elite and then in some cases repaint again.

Generally speaking, my affinity for "the usual Masterpiece Theater fare"--somewhere on the scale from The Tudors to Jane Austen-- is fairly low. All that crisp fluttering in pursuit of privilege and unconditional passion . . . . I can appreciate the elegantly parsed dialogue, the baronial locations, and the porcelain beauties . . . but Dickens, the Tom Wolfe of the mid-nineteenth century (or more accurately, Tom Wolfe as the Dickens of the twentieth century), sees fathomless comedy in the manners and deceits and self-immolations of his fellow mortals, be they rich or poor. Somehow that seems far more real than bosom-heaving.

I watched, thinking how well something like this would play today--modernized say to 2009 America (or London)--perhaps set among the Noel family of Greenwich profiled twice in Vanity Fair, once amid obscene plenty and now this month amid disgrace and near financial and social ruin.

One viewing admonition. The first hour of Little Dorrit is a bit confining, set largely at the Marshallsea debtors prison and in Mrs. Clennam's creaking mansion (with her cocked-neck servant Mr. Flintwinch). But the film soon opens up. Hell, there's even a rubes-progress-like Grand Tour through the Italian Alps and Venice.