Not content with trying to create a miniseries about Mary Bennet, the virtue-signaling Regency hipster beloved by virtue-signaling modern-day hipsters everywhere who think that Jane Austen was soooo mean to their alter ego, the makers have cast Richard E. Grant as Mr. Bennet. I have no particular beef with Mr. Grant, although to judge by the clips I’ve seen, his take on Sir Walter Elliot in Netflix Persuasion would have benefited from a bit more of the silly fop schtick he brought to the Scarlet Pimpernel. And yes, it’s a bit disheartening to think that in The Other Bennet Sister he may once again be called upon to play a humorously absurd and irresponsible Jane Austen dad character as a generic jerk.

More importantly from my point of view, he put in an appearance as a minor baddie in Star Wars: Rise of Skywalker, which is just a teensy bit inconvenient

to a person who is writing a space regency with injokes built around the actors who have “crossed over” between Pride and Prejudice (and its spinoffs) and Star Wars (and its spinoffs). I’ve seen enough of Grant in other things to where I’m sure I’ll come up with some way (1) to nod towards his upcoming role as Mr. Bennet, but any excuse to be annoyed with the BBC in general (and the makers of The Other Bennet Sister in particular) is a good one.

(1) One of the space regency’s core injokes is built around an actor whose P&P work is 100% unavailable to modern audiences, but whom I’d seen quite a bit of in other roles. Extrapolating what a man’s take on an Austen character *ought* be like when I don’t have a time machine to watch him in the role myself is nothing new for the space regency project.