P&P is an astonishingly flexible novel. It’s been adapted twice into movies that soften the characters and leave out half the plot, and one surviving miniseries successfully hits most of the important notes (and finds room to embellish here and there) in six episodes running around 24 minutes apiece, for a total of slightly under two and a half hours. The version I am daydreaming about here is funded by a streaming service as a series of 8 episodes, running around an hour apiece. I do not have strong ideas about how to break down the individual episodes, but I feel that with more vignettes to illustrate character and setting and turn narration into events, we should get there without much difficulty…

-Our prologue starts us off twenty-plus years before present day. We meet William Lucas, not yet “Sir,” a married merchant somewhere in his thirties or early forties, who is hosting a party that includes his wife’s friends the Misses Gardiners, and their suitors Mr. Phillips and Mr. Bennet. The latter is a quiet, well-dressed man who has little to say but obviously enjoys basking in the splendor of his lady. The future Mrs. Bennet is very pretty, very energetic, very “look at me.” She talks about her nerves, but in a playful, “oh my, I’m almost overcome with all this excitement” kind of way. The one flash of ill humor is when she sees the Lucases’ small daughter Charlotte peering over the bannister at the party, and scolds the child. Mr. Bennet tells her not to worry herself about it, the girl is doing no harm. His actions are kind, but it’s clear that he’s only doing this to calm Miss Jenny(1) Gardiner down. The future Mrs. Phillips teases Jenny about not have a head for economizing. Jenny says she just never had the right teacher, Mr. Bennet says he would be delighted to teach her anything she wishes to know.

-And then we start montaging. The Bennets’ marriage, with a spectacularly overdressed Jenny. Pregnant Jenny trying to wheedle a more fashionable carriage out of her husband. He’s concerned that buying it will take too much out of their income for the year, and that they need to save for the future. She reminds him that they will probably have a son and break that nasty old entail. We get basically one such vignette for each of Mrs. Bennet’s pregnancies. Her charming archness gets more mechanical and less sincere each time, her complaints about her nerves get less cutesy and more insistent as they battle over all the fashionable things she wants and can only have if they don’t save their money. Mr. Bennet’s humor gets harder and more bitter, but the faint echo of bicker-flirting lingers between them. By the last vignette (pregnant with Lydia), we are getting glimpses of the two eldest daughters, quietly watching their parents go round and round. As for the parents, they’re pretty much set in what we will see them as for the rest of the series:

–He’s resigned to his situation but quietly bitter about it. He spends a lot of time running the estate himself, and a lot of time seemingly trying to balance the books – there’s at least one vignette where he shows up and announces he’s managed to find enough money to buy something his wife wanted only to discover that she’s set her heart on something similar but more expensive. He always gives into his wife, but you can see he hates himself for it, in kind of the way Colin Firth’s Darcy looks uncomfortable immediately after being rude sometimes. He’s sort of mildly fond of his daughters, without really knowing how to relate to most of them: his response to his wife’s complaints about Kitty timing her coughs ill is, yes, an attempt to score off his wife, but also an attempt to protect Kitty and make Mary step up. His conversation with Kitty after Lydia’s elopement is tongue-in-cheek throughout. There’s real concern underneath his snark about daughter Jane and her husband being cheated by their servants. He dresses in a conservative, rather old-fashioned style, but neatly and correctly, and he does *not* go around unshaven like Donald Sutherland in the 2005 version. Broadly speaking, this Mr. Bennet is funny in kind of an Eeyore way, and not unsympathetic from a certain point of view, but he’s neither as gently amusing as the most popular adaptations make him, nor as awful as certain Mrs. Bennet cheerleaders (see below) want him to be.

–Still a good-looking woman somewhere in her forties, Jenny Bennet may not be a clinical narcissist, but she’s what laypeople call narcissistic. Her daughters are mostly counters in a game of marrying well, with the prize being the comfortable home Mrs. Bennet will move into, when Longbourne passes out of the family. She doesn’t even play the game well: she has all the girls out on the marriage market at once when it would be cheaper to have only two or three, and she’s more interested in gossip and oneupmanship with her neighbors than in actually doing anything that would help their chances. Lydia she treats as an extension of herself and a chance to vicariously relive her youth; Jane and Kitty she views as docile props in her plans; Lizzie and Mary she views as rather uncooperative props, and dislikes them accordingly. The so-called feminists who excuse her by infantilizing her and insist that Mr. Bennet ought to make her do this or that like a good patriarch should find this miniseries very, very, VERY annoying, and if they didn’t, I would feel that we would have partially failed.

—She’s constantly ordering exotic foods up from London when her husband would rather they make do with what the home farm can produce. At least once in the miniseries, he wanders into the drawing room and discovers that she’s changed the wallpaper and the furniture since he was last there. She’s never dressed the same way twice in the series, and always in the height of the fashion of the day. She’s not a screecher; her diction is plummy and correct in an exaggerated way, like some of the old-school actresses who’ve tackled the part, and her background shows more in her choice of words and obvious ignorance than in her voice per se. She has a smug, wink-nudge attitude towards her daughters’ prospective or actual husbands that makes her seem like a pimp or a madam in those moments…because she is so purely focused on how the economics of the prospective marriage affects *her.* She calls on her nerves the way Red Foxx on Sanford and Son used to invoke his late wife (“I’m comin’ Elizabeth!”) and threaten to have a heart attack. Unlike Red Foxx IRL, there’s not much wrong with her physically. A woman who can produce five healthy, closely spaced offspring, with the Regency’s lack of decent medical care, and still have strength and energy for the stuff Mrs. Bennet does, has the constitution of an ox, no matter how much time she spends lying down whining about Lydia’s elopement.

-The products of this unfortunate union are as follows:

–Jane Bennet: a tall, slim, rather fragile-seeming, very good-looking young woman, I think 22 or 23. Jane Austen mentioned in a letter that Jane Bennet/Mrs. Bingley’s favorite color was green, so maybe try to aim for an actress who can wear green, and dress her in shades of that? In temperament, she’s a mellow, rather detached person who tries to take the good with the bad, and although she would not use this terminology, does not like to waste energy on bad experiences or people. Possibly at some point, she tells Lizzie that she doesn’t believe in holding grudges against people who’ve wronged her – their parents have done that, and it hasn’t done them any good.

–Elizabeth Bennet: a shorter, more energetic woman of twentyish. Caroline’s description of her late in the book implies a narrow, somewhat angular face with a well-shaped but generic nose and good teeth. Probably a lollipop figure rather than a column; large expressive dark eyes, tans readily, probably dark brown hair. (Black was a fashionable hair color; Darcy and Caroline wouldn’t have dinged her looks quite so hard if Lizzie had black hair). Author said character’s favorite color was yellow, cast and dress her accordingly. Above absolutely everything else she must be *charming*, so charming that a man falls in love with her partially because she mocks him so charmingly. Twenty up through the Hunsford trip, turns 21 around the time she returns home.

–The two eldest sisters are not that big on conspicuous consumption; they have an evening gown apiece, an indoor day gown apiece, and a less-good walking dress apiece, and they use shawls, gloves and other accessories, plus hairstyling, to vary their looks.

–Mary Bennet: usually played as a frumpy religious scold, I see her rather as a presentable but not super-fashionable hipster and bluestocking. In place of Lizzie’s teasing humor and her father’s rather grim sarcasm, Mary has a chronic, rather angry sneer of superiority, less sophisticated and less well-hidden than Caroline Bingley’s. She wears blue in unflattering shades and elegant but rather matronly styles, plays depressing, complicated music well, and remarks out loud (in a paraphrase of the book) that Mr. Collins could be molded into a promising man if he would let himself be guided by her. She’s nineteen, which is I think older than the book has her. The viewer should *not* pity her; she enjoys her feelings of overlooked specialness immensely, in her way. Jane Austen told her family that this Bennet sister married a clerk who worked for her uncle Mr. Phillips; we should see this young man’s courtship as a series of vignettes, starting with a meeting at one of the Phillipses parties and continuing with visits to the Bennet home. We don’t hear much dialogue between them, but it’s just something that’s continuously going on in any large gathering that includes all the Bennet women.

–Kitty Bennet: shortest of the family, good-natured, rambunctious when she feels comfortable but easily intimidated. Greek chorus to Lydia most of the time, but gets to go to Lambton/Pemberley with Lizzie (and Jane, in this version) and meets the clergyman she will later marry as part of that trip. (Lydia’s letter reaches her there as well.) Wears lavender in clashing shades, and never the same outfit twice. Eighteen at the start of this version.

–Lydia Bennet: tallest of the family, curvy in the mid-20th c. sense of the word. Nine months younger than Kitty, turns eighteen (and has it marked by a family dinner) shortly before her trip to Brighton. She has a spiteful streak that comes out here and there, but mostly she’s her mother’s daughter; a spoiled, charming creature who needs to be the center of attention. Wears pink in clashing shades, and never the same outfit twice.

-The two youngest daughters and their mother share a motif of wearing extravagant, rather ridiculous clothes in unflattering styles and colors and doing stupid things to their hair. Mary dresses in a style that’s off-key and unflattering but neither frumpy nor extravagant; the two eldest dress more simply but in a way that suits them.

-Longbourne: The exterior of the house should date to at least 50-60 years before the present day setting. The interior should be an oppressive hodge-podge of everything fashionable in the Regency, with a running gag about Mrs. Bennet renovating this or that room at any given time. The net effect should be of a place in expensive bad taste, most of it impossible to get comfortable in, while the master of the house hides out in the library (a comfortable place of old books and rich wood finishes, with a fireplace and a grandfather clock), only emerging to argue unsuccessfully about finances. Jane and Lizzie share confidences either in the “prettyish sort of wilderness” near the house, or hanging around the home farm, which is a significant walk away from the main house. (No pigs or chickens close to the main house. That’s the kind of thing you would see at a mere parsonage like Hunsford Cottage!)

-Lucases, Phillipses and Gardiners: The best Sir William Lucas to date is IMO is the Italian one, which I think captures his mixture of pomposity, intrusiveness and childlike good nature without simply going for LOUD AND CRASS, so we’re taking him for a role model. His twenty-seven-year-old daughter Charlotte is the bemused, detached cynic that Mr. Bennet and Mary Bennet wish they were. Like her friends the older Bennet sisters, she dresses tastefully and not extravagantly. (Remember, Mrs. Bennet thinks Lady Lucas is a bit of a tightwad). Mrs. Phillips is I think more good-natured and less self-centered than her sister, but still unsubtle in her manners. The Gardiners are rather younger than the other couples, with the wife being mid/late thirties at most and her husband somewhere between that and his older sister Jenny in age.

-Mr. Collins: The book specifies a tallish, heavily built young man, not hideous-looking. The versions I find most entertaining go for ingratiating idiot who can’t read the room rather than sleazy freak, so we’re going in that direction.

(1)The naming convention throughout the Austen novels is pretty consistent for eldest daughters: if the mother gets a first name, it matches the eldest daughter’s. Therefore, Mrs. Bennet was most likely a Jane, like her eldest daughter. If you find a fanfic calling Mrs. Bennet “Fanny,” they’re borrowing from Andrew Davies’s script for the 1995 adaptation.