Doctor Zhivago is a 2002 British television drama serial directed by Giacomo Campiotti and starring Hans Matheson, Keira Knightley and Sam Neill.

In Tsarist Russia in the early 1900s, Victor Komarovsky, an unctuous, wealthy businessman with political connections, is involved in a casual affair with Lara's bourgeois dressmaker mother Amalia, who encourages her teenage daughter to accept his invitation to dinner in an attempt to retain his financial support of her household.

Meanwhile, Lara is also involved in a relationship with the idealistic reformer Pasha Antipov who drifts into left-wing extremism after being wounded by sabre-wielding Cossacks during a peaceful demonstration.

The two meet when Zhivago and his mentor are called to treat Amalia after she attempts suicide in response to her daughter's relationship with Victor Komarovsky.

In revenge, Lara takes the pistol she has been hiding for Pasha and shoots Komarovsky at a Christmas Eve party but wounds another man by accident.

Zhivago eventually marries his cousin, Tonya Gromeko, with whom he was raised after his father, who was involved in business dealings with Komarovsky, killed himself in 1897.

Together they run a hospital for several months, during which radical changes take place throughout Russia due to the fall of the Tsar and subsequent Bolshevik takeover of the country.

Gordon arranges for travel passes and documents for Zhivago and his family to escape from the continuing unrest in Moscow to the far away Gromeko estate at Varykino in the Ural Mountains.

After a tense interview, Strelnikov informs Yuri that Lara is now living in the town of Yuriatin, then occupied by the anti-communist White Army.

The family lives a peaceful life in Varykino for the next year and a half until Zhivago finds Lara in nearby Yuriatin, and they surrender to their long-repressed feelings and begin an affair.

As the civil war draws to a close, Zhivago deserts the red partisans and treks across the mountains to Lara's house in Yuriatin, where she nurses him back to health.

They initially refuse, but Komarovsky persuades Zhivago that it is in Lara's best interests to leave because of her connection to Strelnikov, who has fallen from favour and lost his position in the Red Army.

Several years later, while sitting in a café, he sees a young boy who reminds him of himself as a child passing on the street with his mother, and he recognizes Lara.

Pretending that they are playing a game, she urges her son to run away as quickly as he can, with the book of poems Zhivago wrote over the years before she surrenders to the authorities.

In discussing adapting the Boris Pasternak novel for television, screenwriter Andrew Davies revealed the task was "daunting because the book is reckoned to be a masterpiece and the film is a great movie and one that I admire very much.

Black-and-white archival photographs – Moscow slums, newspaper shots of soldiers marching off to World War I – are interspersed throughout the film and slowly bleed into a scene of the television show.

Yet Mr. Davies takes the same liberties with Pasternak's text as the original film did, focusing on the love story and discarding a lot of the politics, secondary plots, and literary sidetracks....

This Doctor Zhivago can be watched as a useful history lesson and as a cautionary show business tale: it is a lot easier to adapt a Jane Austen novel than it is to remake a film by David Lean.

"[3] Brian Lowry of Variety observed, "Some will rightfully pine for Maurice Jarre's Oscar-winning score, Julie Christie and Omar Sharif, yet this somewhat less epic take on Boris Pasternak's book is a creditable version, featuring outstanding performances and considerable romance.

"[4] In the Sunday Telegraph John Preston commented "This version treated its audience as intelligent and assumed they had the ability to follow a story that unfolded visually rather than verbally", adding that its "first and most self-evident virtue was that it looked more like a movie than a traditional telly drama.

He was less impressed with Andrew Davies's script and Keira Knightley's Lara, but commended Hans Matheson "terrific as the grown-up Yuri Zhivago – intense, playful, assured" and Giacomo Campiotti's "bravura direction".

[5] Tom Jicha of the South Florida Sun-Sentinel called it "a stunning success" and continued, "Davies' screenplay is involving, the cinematography is captivating, the costuming and set designs evoke a sense of time and place, and the top-of-the-marquee performances are world-class."