The Lizzie Bennet Diaries

Husband was out of town for week (he's back now) and because I wasn't watching the shows we normally watch together, I ended up binge watching the entire Lizzie Bennet Diaries over the weekend. I loved it. I've had it bookmarked for over a year but hadn't actually watched any. It's a web series that ran from 2012-2013 that adapts Pride & Prejudice as a vlog. Interspersed with the main 100 videos are Q&A videos by Lizzie, videos by secondary characters, and twitter conversations. You need to watch and read them all. Some of my favorite moments are on the twitter conversations.

Obviously, as a social media adaptation, The Lizzie Bennet Diaries updates P&P for a contemporary audience, and all of the social drama is brought in line with current American social scandals. It does a fabulous job of translating the drama, but it looses some of the social satire in the process. It does however treat the social drama and character development of Lizzie--not the romance--as the main plot, which is something that I think most adaptions fail to do. That in itself makes this noteworthy as an adaption. I mean, I love Colin Firth as much as the next woman, but P&P is not a romance. The series is funny, with a lot of snark, so it's also nice to see sarcastic, dry humor (like Austen's) make it into an adaption. It has some weak spots with the acting and the writing, but this may be the best P&P adaptation I've encountered because of how it handles the secondary characters.

In most* adaptations I've encountered, the secondary characters are flat stereotypes. This is in part due to the source material which uses the secondary characters to embody different social attitudes toward marriage and women. But Austen does allow for some depth to some of the characters and suggests that Lizzie does not understand some of them. At the very least, Austen allows for believable motivations for their actions. Most adaptations, however, reduce everyone to a type and flatten those wrinkles of complexity. If a secondary character is given depth, it usually happens at the expense of Lizzie and Darcy's ability to develop. They are typed (as perfect usually) so Lydia, for example, can have depth. A lot of the adaptions I've encountered even skip the character development of Lizzie and Darcy so that what develops is their romance, not their view of society. But this adaptation depicts almost every character as complex. Very few are types, and some become very compelling because of this. Even Mrs. Bennet, who is mocked and typed by Lizzie repeatedly, is shown to be more complex than Lizzie sees her. Lizzie as an unreliable narrator who misreads everyone around her is a major component of the adaptation, and having the other characters speak for themselves shows both her flaws and their depth, creating a more complex character development for everyone. It's really well done.

When watching it, I felt like the writers actually understood the book--that they had read it and thought carefully about it instead of just mining it for love scenes and scandal. There's a depth here that I'm just not used to in P&P adaptations. It's not perfect, by any means, but what it does well, it does very well. I would teach this if I were teaching a class in adaptation theory. It's worth watching, but you should take more than the 3 days I did.

*I say "most" here to cover myself. I can't actually think of an exception, but I'm sure there's one I haven't read or seen.