There’s a palpable darkness in Steven Knight’s adaptation of “Great Expectations.” It’s figurative, embedded in the characters and the storyline, but also literal, with dirt and rot caking everything.

FX, in partnership with the BBC, has made a dreary, dismal and not very Dickensian miniseries out of Charles Dickens’ “Great Expectations.” And while that seems to be in some measure the point, it is, ...