When Channel 4 premiered its adaptation of Barbara Taylor Bradford’s A Woman of Substance in 1985, the saga of Emma Harte – the Yorkshire maid who becomes one of the richest women in the world – was a ratings juggernaut. The new eight-part remake arrives with a curious mix of nostalgia and reinvention: an attempt to revive the glossy melodrama of the 1980s bonkbuster, while reframing its heroine for a contemporary audience.

Episode one establishes the drama’s central tension through a double timeline. In 1970s New York, the elderly Emma Harte (Brenda Blethyn) presides over a vast retail empire, but faces betrayal from within her own family. Meanwhile, the narrative flashes back to 1911 Yorkshire, where the young Emma (Jessica Reynolds) works as a maid at the aristocratic Fairley Hall. She begins a forbidden romance with Edwin Fairley (Ewan Horrocks), the master’s youngest son.

It is a structure that foregrounds destiny: we know Emma will triumph, but the question is how.

Taylor Bradford’s 1979 novel is one of the great rags-to-riches fantasies of late-20th-century popular fiction. Its appeal lies partly in the audacity of Emma’s rise: from impoverished servant girl to international business titan.

The new Channel 4 version leans heavily into that mythology. The opening sequence places Blethyn’s Emma in 1970s New York, where young journalist Jim Fairley (Toby........

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