TV REVIEWS : ‘Masterpiece’ Gets Down and Dirty With ‘Poisonings’

Every so often, “Masterpiece Theatre” drops its cultural veneer and gets its gloves dirty with a period melodrama.

Such a case is the Victorian potboiler “The Blackheath Poisonings,” in which the seven deadly sins--and especially gluttony, greed and lust--soar over all those leather-bound Thackeray and Hardy classics that illuminate the program’s mannered logo.

In the first of three weekly episodes (9 p.m. Sunday on KCET-TV Channel 28 and KPBS-TV Channel 15, 8 p.m. on KVCR-TV Channel 24), the opening scene pans into the window of a rooming house, where we meet the heroine, the sensual Lady Isabel, who is on top of Sir Roger. They are illicit lovers--brother- and sister-in-law, actually--who have married into a dysfunctional family of rich, London toy makers.

This being 1895, propriety means everything to their diabolical Victorian spouses and relatives, with whom they live in oppressive splendor in the leafy suburb of Blackheath, in a mansion whose rooms seems washed in the color of blood.

Laced with mysterious poisonings and drenched in Gilded Age excess, “The Blackheath Poisonings” is your casebook filthy-rich yarn, a kind of Victorian “Dallas.”

The miniseries, adapted by Simon Raven from a novel by Julian Symons, is neither textured nor layered enough to seem to rate more than a Harlequin imprint (although Penguin Books has reissued the novel to mark the television series). But for “Masterpiece Theatre” viewers who like to go slumming, the production has a certain hothouse allure.