Fine BBC adaptation of Les Miserables though West seems miscast

I admit I have never read the book and have never seen the play or the musical, mea culpa, but it seems to me that the 6-part BBC/PBS English-language miniseries of Hugo's Les Miserables (2018) does a fine job presenting the highlights of the sinuous narrative, cutting this enormous text down to a fairly simple period piece, love story, and melodrama that follows the course of the eventful life of Jean Valjean (Domenic West), from imprisonment for a petty theft of a loaf of bread, his mistreatment in prison, his enormous strength and resilience, his provocation of the prison warden Javert (David Oyelowo) and lifetime of persecution and pursuit that follow on Valjean's release from prison: a tormented life of guilt, honor, bravery, over-reaching, and penance. The story is told with great clarity and efficiency - credit to director Tom Shankland and writer Andrew Davies - particularly with some of the scenes of the street fighting in Paris as a ragtag group of radicals and revolutionaries confront the Paris police brigade. There must be more to the novel than this series contains, obviously, but it seems that the series touches all the highlights - a fast-track course in the book. Oyelowo is particularly strong in his part; West is fine at times, but he has that weirdly mischievous grin that served him well in The Wire but that sometimes seems out of place here; plus, he's too much of a player to imagine that he could live what appears to be a completely chaste life, entirely devoted to the upbringing of the young woman whom he rescued from an abusive stepfamily - his attachment to her is weird and kind of creepy. The British, of course, excel at period pieces, and somehow the team has managed to film on a contemporary set and in non-Paris locales in a way that seems to capture the look and feel of a 19th-century French Paris and environs. The final brief segment - after the death of Valjean - is a surprising and powerful image, which I won't divulge.