On the plus side: superb costumes and sets. Great fight choreography. From a female's perspective: hot guys! It is entertaining but it could have been so much more! On the minus side: I have read all the Dumas novels: Three Musketeers, 20 Years After, 10 Years Later, Vicomte de Bragelonne, Louise de la Valliere, The Man in the Iron Mask. There is enough great material in Dumas to make any multi-season TV series. Why in the world would some no-name BBC writers think they could do better than Dumas? The plots are over-done and contrived whereas the original Dumas stories never strained the reader's credulity. The Fronde uprising reduced to a simple jewelry heist? Why would the writers take something deep and complex and dumb it down to trivial TV formula tripe? How sad this series wasted hot actors and great characters on dumbed-down TV formula plots when they could have used real history and the original Dumas stories to make a really epic series.