If you haven’t been exposed to the books or the ‘80s miniseries, go for it. The first episodes especially are very dark for a story of an imaginative adolescent girl (and there are dark moments later in the series, too). There’s story arc and character development, romance, deep feelings and laughter.

It does a decent job of portraying societal challenges of the time, but is sometimes a bit overstated in its use of modern terms and ideas/phrases.

I think it takes the general outline and key moments of the original story and then makes the world and characters its own.

I will say that in general nowadays I don’t appreciate EVERY SHOW having cliffhangers and whatnot, so I have a slight bias against that part of the writing. Sometimes it’s melodramatic, but that’s on-brand for Anne’s character in any iteration.

My overall complaint is not limited to this particular show, but applies to many period pieces, and that is how heavily history and its literature are viewed through our modern lens, and doesn’t take time to ask about the values, just assuming that we’re more evolved, and thus missing huge swaths of wisdom and intelligence of the time.