American Catholics were well represented among those transfixed by the BBC miniseries Brideshead Revisited when it first aired on PBS in the winter of 1982. There are many reasons why they found it so captivating – aside from the costumes, and the exceptional beauty of its two male protagonists. One is certainly the treatment of Catholic difference running through it, as it does through Evelyn Waugh’s novel, which it follows very closely. When the Anglican agnostic Charles Ryder (Jeremy Irons) observes that Catholics seem “just like everyone else,” the Catholic aristocrat Sebastian Flyte (Anthony Andrews) appears deeply shocked: “My dear Charles, that’s exactly what they’re not … Everything they think’s important is different from other people.”