This was not the greatest adaptation I have seen of a Jane Austen novel, but it was by no means the worst, and I feel that some of the comments written by other contributors have been unduly harsh.
To be fair, if you want really great Jane Auten heroines then you should look no further than Keira Knightly (in Pride and Prejudice) or Gwynneth Paltrow (in Emma). But then both of those productions had huge budgets, brilliant casts, and certainly the former benefited from one of the finest pieces of film direction I have ever seen. (If you can get to see Pride and Prejudice with the director's spoken comments, as shown on Sky recently, then it is a very worthwhile exercise.) This made-for-TV production was much lower budget, and it showed. But that does not justify some of the mean criticism levelled by others. Billie Piper seems doomed to be remembered as Dr Who's sidekick or Chris Evans' former wife, while her earlier performance in Ruby in the Smoke demonstrated that she is a very capable actress. So, too, here, and she was really let down by some less able direction within a limited shooting time-frame. Would the BBC have done it better? Probably ... but on the whole this was a fair crack at a slightly lesser known Jane Austen story, and worth a second look with a slightly less critical hat on!!!
To be fair, if you want really great Jane Auten heroines then you should look no further than Keira Knightly (in Pride and Prejudice) or Gwynneth Paltrow (in Emma). But then both of those productions had huge budgets, brilliant casts, and certainly the former benefited from one of the finest pieces of film direction I have ever seen. (If you can get to see Pride and Prejudice with the director's spoken comments, as shown on Sky recently, then it is a very worthwhile exercise.) This made-for-TV production was much lower budget, and it showed. But that does not justify some of the mean criticism levelled by others. Billie Piper seems doomed to be remembered as Dr Who's sidekick or Chris Evans' former wife, while her earlier performance in Ruby in the Smoke demonstrated that she is a very capable actress. So, too, here, and she was really let down by some less able direction within a limited shooting time-frame. Would the BBC have done it better? Probably ... but on the whole this was a fair crack at a slightly lesser known Jane Austen story, and worth a second look with a slightly less critical hat on!!!