I, more than anyone that I know, bemoans the fact that there seems to be so few new ideas coming from the makers of movies and television. Every big movie going season seems filled with remakes of older films, big screen adaptations of books, TV shows and video games, and rehashes of the same tired material again and again. TV, as well, tends to stick to the formulaic, forcing innovative shows to pay cable and leaving us folks with meager budgets to wait for the DVD releases.

Every once in a while, though, a brilliant rethinking of an already told story comes along and gives me a brief glimmer of hope. Such is the case with Jekyll, a darkly funny and biting take on the famous story exploring the duality of man.

In Steven Moffat's rendition, the good doctor was not a willing participant in the experiment, but had to find out the hard way that his id takes over for hours at a stretch. When we meet Jekyll (or Tom Jackman as he is known in this version), he is deep within this dual life and been forced to work out a sort of timeshare arrangement with his id, following his alter ego's with a GPS tracker and leaving notes for him on a digital recorder.

The catch of it all being that his Hyde doesn't know about Jackman/Jekyll's life - the marriage he left in hopes of protecting his wife and children, and his hopes to find a cure for this personality switching that is controlling his life. Although that alone would make for an interesting thriller, but this six part series adds in a military industrial conspiracy that involves Dr. Jackman's former employers, a shady top secret organization, and the original Dr. Jekyll, who, according to this program, was a real person turned fictional by Robert Louis Stevenson.

All of this, really, would be for naught if it wasn't for the brilliant casting of James Nesbitt in the lead role. Nesbitt (who has been seen on the big screen in Match Point and Millions) is nimbly able to vacillate between personae, as well as edging ever so close to the line of overacting when he is in full Hyde mode, without going over the edge. It is one of the best dramatic TV performances I've seen since The Sopranos ended.