The Other Bennet Sister reimagines Austen – again

Can British television keep pumping out period drama? Or will audiences succumb to a kind of bonnet fatigue, and insist on a screen-wide ban on breeches and bodices?

A Netflix take on Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (interesting casting with Emma Corrin playing Elizabeth Bennet, and Jack Lowden as Fitzwilliam Darcy) is in the works, but first there’s Sarah Quintrell’s new BBC One adaptation of Janice Hadlow’s 2020 bestseller The Other Bennet Sister.

Austen’s most famous novel is viewed through the lens of Mary, the socially awkward Bennet sister. As we’re instantly reminded, Mary, played by Ella Bruccoleri (Call The Midwife), is the bluestocking of the five girls. She’s not radiant like Jane (Maddie Close), witty like Elizabeth (Poppy Gilbert), appealing like Kitty (Molly Wright), or spirited like Lydia (Grace Hogg-Robinson).

Her mother Mrs Bennet, portrayed as a monstrous scold by Ruth Jones, despairs of Mary’s ruddy complexion and spectacles (“Why is everything about you so relentlessly disappointing?”). Mr Bennet (Richard E Grant) is famously moved to interrupt Mary’s calamitous piano performance (“You have delighted us long enough”). Sidelined, humiliated, resigned, Mary resolves to forge her own bookish path.

This is Austen reimagined: feminism twirling a lace parasol. Bruccoleri drives home Mary’s supposed plainness – scrunching her nose beneath spectacles – and abrasiveness – correcting men’s diction. Seemingly excluded from the marital meat market of the Regency era – a women’s prospects are “marriage or misery” intones Anna Fenton-Garvey’s double-dealing Charlotte Lucas – Mary moves to London to serve as a governess. While enemies snipe (Tanya Reynolds is a caustic Caroline Bingley), men – unobtainable Mr Hayward (Dónal Finn); quirky Mr Ryder (Laurie Davidson) – swirl into Mary’s orbit.

Delivered over 10 half-hour episodes with nods to modern period drama and many balls, it’s all a bit “Bridgerton without the budget” but not without charm. Pride and Prejudice plotlines – including those featuring Elizabeth and Darcy – are woven in (Lucy Briers, who played Mary in Andrew Davies’s beloved 1995 series, starring Colin Firth and Jennifer Ehle, is cast as Mrs Hill, the maid).

The Other Bennet Sister has an insipid start, but rallies. Crucially, Bruccoleri lends Mary a good-humoured dignity, with the sense that hope springs eternal beneath her empire necklines. This is a drama where it’s imperative to root for the dogged, no-nonsense anti-heroine, and root for her you do.

Few who saw Amazon Prime Video’s Jury Duty (2023) could forget it. It was an audacious, hilarious hoax series that staged a criminal trial in which every single jury member, lawyer, witness and defendant was an actor, bar one man – the unsuspecting Ronald Gladden, who believed he was taking part in a documentary about the criminal justice system with other ordinary people.

Created by Lee Eisenberg and Gene Stupnitsky, it featured personality clashes, mischief, a lavatorial catastrophe, and actor (and executive producer) James Marsden playing a narcissistic version of himself. Part of the fascination was whether Jury Duty – an untried concept, filmed without Gladden’s consent, was unethical. In the event, Gladden was awarded $100,000 prize money and globally lauded as a good sport.

Could such a stunt be pulled off again? In Jury Duty Presents: Company Retreat, we are no longer in the courtroom, but at the offsite corporate retreat of the fictional company Rockin’ Grandma’s Hot Sauce. The only person who isn’t an improvising actor is 25-year-old temp HR assistant, Anthony Norman, from Nashville, Tennessee, who has been told a documentary is being made about the retreat.

The production is considerably scaled up and the sizeable cast must convince as seasoned co-workers. Jeopardy is provided by the company chief executive Doug (Jerry Hauck) wanting to leave his family business to his slacker son Dougie (Alex Bonifer), but considering selling it to a financial equity firm.

Much fun is had with the eccentricities of co-workers and deranged workplace retreat motifs, including dull seminars – one by an “Emotions and Vulnerability Expert” – and dodgy brainstorming: should the company change its name to Rockin’ Stepsister (“Stepsister is the most searched-for relative on the internet”)? There’s an impressive guest star cameo and plenty of examples of the show’s nuking of the boundaries of good taste.

Norman, appointed “Captain Fun” by his colleagues, is the beating heart of the series, and has a leftfield sense of humour and a little bite. Does the show pull off the hoax again? Does Norman twig? This outing might not have quite the surprise element of the first, but it’s still a comedy masterclass of large-scale improvisation. If the original Jury Duty was The Truman Show with belly laughs, this is a worthy sequel.

Also on Amazon Prime Video, there’s the return of another idiosyncratic television concept, LOL: Last One Laughing UK, hosted by Jimmy Carr with Roisin Conaty.

With different versions broadcast globally, this series is a bizarre mashup of reality and standup: comedians enter a quasi-Big Brother house and over six hours (turned into six half-hour episodes) they must make each other laugh, but whoever laughs twice is eliminated.

The first hit series included Richard Ayoade and Joe Wilkinson, and was won by the indefatigably surreal Bob Mortimer. Here, Mortimer returns to defend his title (His advice: “Get a safety face … you have to have one”). Mortimer’s new sparring partners include Alan Carr, David Mitchell, Diane Morgan and the Australian comedian Sam Campbell.

The escalating lunacy is sharpened by the palpable performance anxiety of comedians failing to raise laughs. This bunch seem more determined than before. At times, it feels like a comedy remake of Gladiator staged in a Colosseum of bruised egos.

Photographs by BBC/Bad Wolf/Courtesy of Prime