A century and a half ago, Jules Verne wrote Around the World in Eighty Days, and readers began to imagine that the world might be shrinking a wee bit.
The new Masterpiece series on PBS, starring the transcendent David Tennant, reimagines and recasts the central characters and chunks of the narrative in a modern retelling of Verne’s adventure story—which has already been retold many times, including in the classic Academy Award–winning 1956 film.
A sedentary…