The BBC's move away from traditional costume dramas will be bad news for lovers of bonnets and breeches but good news for those who think the genre might have got a bit stale.
It has been difficult to move around BBC1's schedule over the past couple of years without falling over a pile of corsets with shows such as Bleak House, Cranford, Sense and Sensibility, Little Dorrit, Tess of the D'Urbervilles, Lark Rise to Candleford, and Oliver Twistall battling for airtime.
And while there is no doubt that the BBC is extremely good at these adaptations - world renowned in fact - and that audiences on the whole still love them, the general view is that there have probably been a few too many of them.
Of course, when you have too much of a good thing you can get a little bit sick, so the fact that the BBC will give them a rest should ultimately help the genre in the long run. And there will probably be one more later this year for those who can't live without them.
Instead of the bonnets and breeches, the BBC is to focus its energies on new dramas from different historical periods as well as a grittier side of the 19th century.
While the new version of The 39 Steps - one of the first examples of this new type of drama - was underwhelming in my view, although I know others who loved it, I for one am excited by the new direction.
A forthcoming adaptation of the award winning novel Small Island, about Jamaican immigrants to Britain in the 1940s, and Desperate Romantics, about a group of "vagabond painters and poets" set amongst the "alleys, galleries and flesh houses of 19th century industrial London", sound promising.
The new thinking, which will take five years to fully implement because of the long production cycles for major scripted projects, is one of the first major planks of a new era at BBC drama, following the departure of controller of fiction Jane Tranter at the end of last year and the arrival of Ben Stephenson.
Drama insiders have been slightly sniffy of Stephenson's appointment, but this move shows that he is his own man and has his own ideas. There has been criticism in the past that BBC drama can get too stuck in a rut. This new vision is a start in proving that wrong.
