Fitting a novel‘s plot into two hours is an undertaking like jamming Cinderella‘s stepsister’s foot into the glass slipper: You have to hack off toes or full limbs. But this is the age of binge-watching, and directors need to make fewer procrustean compromises to runtime now. Instead, they just make a miniseries, a format that offers the salvation of adequate time. A bit of promise, therefore, twinkled faintly and tantalizingly out from Netflix‘s new The Leopard, an adaptation of Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s 1958 portrait of Sicilian aristocratic decline.

The Leopard, the sole novel written by Tomasi, published posthumously, is a considerably autobiographical tale of the decline of a Sicilian aristocratic family amid the Risorgimento. It is fantastic. The tone is one of active mourning for the old days of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies if it also doesn’t really make any sort of argument for its merits. Its protagonist, Prince Fabrizio, adopts the most aristocratic attitude toward change: largely simply ruefully watching it unfold. Tomasi writes that he, “lived in perpetual discontent under his Jovelike frown, watching the ruin of his own class and his own inheritance without ever making, still less wanting to make, any move toward saving it.”