Even though I had hoped so much that this would be a faithful rendition of the original HG Wells novel, done in the manner the BBC used to convert novels into shows, I knew in my heart it was not to be. As a result when I saw episode 1, I was not too disappointed, but by god could someone do a faithful rendition of the original book, pretty please.
Anyway, apart from that little rave the first episode was reasonable. The first 20 minutes was dominated by domestic backstory development and most of this could easily be skipped over without missing anything important. First casualty at 36 minutes. Gets reasonably exciting at 43 minutes and the spider thingy appear at about 48 minutes. I think it looked pretty good and the sound effects were good as well. High point at 76 min, after which its back to domestic boredom until the ending at 84min. A rather long episode, which could explain the long drawn out boring bits.
The relationship story is not bad, its just pointless and rather boring. I would suggest recording this and fast forwarding through the boring bit to get to the meat of the story. The core story, as least in episode 1, is still pretty good, but the whole feeling of hopelessness which the novel portrays is missing, which is the real down side of the core story. Perhaps its simply not possible to convert a novel into film, so I can't really criticise the BBC for this, but I must admit the 1953 version of the movie did it a lot better.