There’s a reason why Alexandre Dumas’ 1840s novel “The Count of Monte Cristo” has survived an uncanny number of adaptations (more than four dozen versions for film and television, in multiple languages), for good or ill: It’s a pretty great story. At its heart, it’s a tale of revenge: A young Marseilles sailor, Edmond Dantès, is seized by police (on the eve of his wedding, no less) and falsely accused of treason; he’s thrown into a hellish prison and spends years there plotting a rather improbable escape. Upon finally emerging after 15 years, he seizes a hidden fortune, reinvents himself as the mysterious Count of Monte Cristo and gets busy wreaking elaborate revenge on those who have wronged him, as one would. (Well, I would.)

The latest version, made for British television and now airing/streaming on PBS, is both handsomely rendered and enjoyably silly: the very definition of a guilty pleasure. Directed by Bille August (whose many credits include “The House of the Spirits” and “A Fortunate Man”), it’s an eight-part series filmed in numerous gorgeous locations in France, Italy and Malta. Yes, that’s the actual 16th-century island prison Château d’If making a haunting cameo appearance at the beginning of the series, as Edmond’s fiancée, Mercédès, gazes sadly across the water at the prison, and then again at the end, in a very different context. It plays its part well.

Sam Claflin (“Daisy Jones & the Six,” “Enola Holmes”) stars as Edmond, a role that requires him to age nearly two decades, look handsome while moldering away in a prison, transform effectively into a velvet-coated gentleman and sell extremely dramatic and ominous dialogue such as “The vengeance I will deliver will equal the crime,” and he’s very much up to the job. Jeremy Irons makes a relatively brief appearance in the early episodes as the Abbé Faria, an elderly scholar and inmate-next-door who helps Edmond tunnel his way out of the prison, gives him etiquette lessons and tips him off to the hidden treasure before conveniently shuffling off this mortal coil. (Irons, somehow, makes all of this seem perfectly reasonable.) Ana Girardot is the heartbroken Mercédès; Harry Taurasi is her evil cousin Fernand, who wants Mercédès for himself and schemes with Danglars (Blake Ritson, of “The Gilded Age”) to remove Edmond from the picture.

The fact that a lot about “The Count of Monte Cristo” makes no sense whatsoever — why does Mercédès, or for that matter any of the characters, not recognize Edmond immediately? Why are people always dying of grief? Was everyone in 18th-century France busy poisoning each other? — matters not at all; what’s more important here are the absolutely stunning rooms in which all of this takes place, and the conviction with which the cast delivers their occasionally ill-written dialogue. (My favorite is Mercédès, in the ominous tones of someone pronouncing an execution: “Now is hardly the time to go to the opera, Albert.”) The plot gets rather intricate, as adaptations of thousand-page classic novels tend to be, and you may at times lose track of exactly who is poisoning who, and wonder how this series can be simultaneously so complicated and yet so obvious. (Someone actually says in the first episode, gazing at the Château d'If, “No one gets out of there alive.” Well, if that’s true, we have a pretty long seven episodes coming up, don’t we?)

But this “Count of Monte Cristo” overall works wonderfully, with some delightful performances (Ritson is awfully good at snakelike nastiness) and just enough poignancy to justify its running time. Claflin and Girardot, though separated for much of the series, have genuine chemistry, and Mercédès’ slow (too slow, but never mind) realization that this swashbuckling count is her beloved Edmond is genuinely moving. “Have you ever truly been in love?” she asks the count, gazing at him as if trying to piece a puzzle together. His pause before answering is as vast as the sea surrounding the Château d’If. “Once,” he finally says.

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'THE COUNT OF MONTE CRISTO'

Rating: TV-14

How to watch: 10 p.m. ET Sundays on PBS (and streaming on the PBS app and PBS Masterpiece on Prime Video)

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