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In some ways, turning William Makepeace Thackeray’s Vanity Fair into a weekly costume drama is a return to its serialised roots. Now considered a classic novel, it is set during the Napoleonic Wars and first appeared in 1847-8 (around the same time Wuthering Heights was published) in serial format in the satirical magazine Punch. This set-up promised monthly instalments which were designed to keep readers on tenterhooks. As such, Vanity Fair comes with built-in twists, turns, and tantalising cliff-hangers; ITV has decided to squeeze them into just seven episodes, sparing us all from the original 19 months of high society shenanigans. It is also a handy short-term stand-in for Victoria, ITV’s standard choice of Sunday night drama in recent years; a third series only started filming in May and looks increasingly like it will make a New Year’s return.

Vanity Fair wants you to know that it is a fictional construction. Unlike some of its period drama peers, which are engaged in a constant battle to outrun their own invention, it is flagrantly aware of its constructedness. The text’s unreliable narrator is interpreted as Thackeray himself, played here by the lesser-spotted high drama Michael Palin, who opens the show by bringing a gaudy carousel to life with a click of his fingers. On it, of course, are his characters, spinning round and round at the behest of their creator. It essentially replaces the text’s framing puppet show – a medium which has lost some of its sheen in the last century and a half – though starting every episode with a slow motion Becky Sharp howl seems a little unnecessary.

This sense of fictionality is everywhere – if you know how to look for it. Big houses spin stage-like onto screen. Uncanny camera angles pop in every now and then, shot from slightly above or below or placed in the corner of a room like a fish-eye lens. The colours are intense and the contrast is strong; the airy, pastel Sedley house almost literally fades to black as Becky leaves for the murky Queen’s Crawley. A trip to Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens revels in its own Bacchanalian theatricality. Bustling, shadowy, and tightly claustrophobic, the audience faces sensory bombardment as fire-breathers, animal tamers and peddlers criss-cross the screen. This laissez-faire attitude to suspension of disbelief is exemplified by the use of modern songs on the soundtrack. If you’ve ever wanted to know what Downton Abbey would have been like with Madonna playing over the closing scenes, you’ve come to the right place.

In a genre which is often characterised by efforts to convince audiences of historical plausibility, breaking the fourth wall is practically sacrilege – which is probably why Vanity Fair’s anti-heroine Becky Sharp (Olivia Cooke) does it in every episode. It is startling to see a woman who dresses like Lizzie Bennet melt out of period drama mode in order give the audience a sly glance or a raised eyebrow before simply melting back in again. It is surprisingly effective. It creates a contract between the audience and a protagonist who – being scheming, smart, and ambitious – could easily slip into being unlikeable. You are in on her secrets, which makes them acceptable. Born into relative poverty as the daughter of an artist and an opera girl, Becky determines to escape her role as French teacher at an uptight girls’ school and make her own way in the world. She displays a talent for social climbing which borders on the sociopathic. In the hands of this adaptation, it’s kind of brilliant.

The chalk to Becky’s ruthless cheese is new best friend Amelia Sedley (Claudia Jessie), a girl whose sweetness is matched only by her naivety (and, at least at first, her family’s wealth). Amelia, known as Emmy, counts herself lucky to have fallen in love with her friend George (Charlie Rowe), a young soldier of a similar class whom she expects will marry her as soon as he can be bothered to develop a heart. For a production whose background is about as subtle as a well-shaken bottle of Fanta, sometimes a great deal is accomplished in relatively few words: it is immediately established that the blond, pixie-ish soldier Dobbin (Johnny Flynn) is in love with Emmy, while Becky and the rakish Rawdon Crawley (a stand-out Tom Bateman) basically undress each other with their eyes alone.

This younger cast are joined by an array of household British names in supporting roles, including Simon Russell Beale (Penny Dreadful; about a million Shakespeare adaptations), Claire Skinner (Outnumbered), and Suranne Jones (Doctor Foster). Martin Clunes goes for an unusually sinister tone as crude Sir Pitt Crawley while Frances de la Tour goes full diva as his rich sister Lady Matilda. The series gallops along apace, with Becky departing one household or failed wooing only to land right in another. The scheming is delicious, the dialogue punchy, and it even takes time for an almost-emotional moment or two. It remains to be seen whether audiences will stick by the frustrating decisions and increasingly fractured relationships still to come in the saga, but Vanity Fair’s first half brings verve and flash to a well-trodden genre.