Overall Adaptation Verdict: Three Versions, One Impossible Story
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1. What Each Version Does Best.
   One gold star for the novel, one for Lean’s film, one for Davies’s serial. They don’t have to be for the same thing. (Suggested categories: Best Rendering of a Poet’s Interior Life as Something Worth Dying For; Best Single Image of Russia as Both Beautiful and Annihilating; Best Use of a Love Story to Make a Political Argument Feel Personal; Best Performance of a Character Who Has Made an Accommodation With History and Still Regrets It; Best Ending That Refuses to Resolve What the Source Left Open.)
2. Recommend: Read, Watch, or Both?
   If a friend had time for only one version — novel, Lean film, or Davies serial — which would you send them to first, and why? Would your answer change if they want Pasternak’s poetry and philosophical argument? If they want the spectacle and the score? If they want an intimate, physically frank rendering of the love story? And is there a case that all three versions are genuinely necessary — that Lean gives you the event, Davies gives you the texture, and the novel gives you the one thing neither screen version can provide: the poems?
3. Final Club Gut Check.
   On the dial from ‘faithful adaptation that honors its source’ to ‘a work that found the cinematic equivalent of what its source was trying to do,’ where do each of the two screen versions land? And the question all three versions keep pressing: Pasternak wrote Doctor Zhivago knowing it might cost him everything, and it did. Lean made his film knowing it would have to simplify a work of that ambition, and it did. Davies made his serial knowing it would be compared to one of the most celebrated films of the 1960s, and it was. Which act of making strikes you as the most defensible — and which one, in the end, came closest to honoring what a poet wrote in secret, in a country that had decided his kind of interiority was a form of treason?

Use, tweak, or mash these questions as needed — your club, your answers.