The Lizzie Bennet Diaries: First Impressions

I just finished watching The Lizzie Bennet Diaries, a contemporary web video + social media version of Austen's Pride and Prejudice, so here are some first impressions (snicker...).  There might be small production-specific spoilers below, so proceed with caution if you care about such things.

There are pluses and minuses to the reduced cast.  Mr. and Mrs Bennet, Lady Catherine, the Gardiners, all but one of the militia, and most other secondary characters, do not appear at all, or if they do, it is only through Lizzie's costumed caricatures.  (The caricatures themselves, on the other hand, are uniformly wonderful.  I especially like the cleverly tossed off one used for Georgiana.)   In particular, I missed Mr. Bennett and Lady Catherine.  The A&E production, for example, got a lot of fine mileage out of the interactions between Elizabeth and her father.

I also thought that the substitute for (what my kids always called) the "Lady Catherine de Bourgh Argument" was a weak spot.  The book and the A&E production wrung that incident for much more force than does LBD.

The choice to turn Kitty into an actual cat was appropriate, since in the book Kitty Bennett is pretty much nothing but a slight foil for the wit of the other characters.  Teasing the cat had much the same effect.  Turning Anne de Bourgh into a puppy followed, I suppose, but in any case Anne has no major dramatic impact in any version.

Turning Mary into an emo cousin worked very well.  It avoided the clutter problem of having too many sisters in the house, while still affording her plenty of screen time.  As it happens, I discovered this production because Mary is played by Briana Cuoco, Kaley Cuoco's sister, and of course I knew of Kaley from Big Bang Theory.

It just occurred to me (duh) that only relatively young actors appear.  Perhaps simple logistics explains the elimination of the elderly characters I mentioned above, and the enhanced roles for Mary, Maria, Charlotte, Fitzwilliam, and Georgiana.  The handling of Charlotte, in particular, gave plenty of well-used room to explore the "best friend" relationship with Lizzie.

The casting of the three sisters was near perfect, although I'd like to know if the actors used hair dyes to get the various shades of red-brunette to match their personae so well.  Lizzie was a bit too frantic, and Jane a bit too ditzy (at least before "New Jane") for my taste.  Lydia nailed it right down the middle.

All along I was wondering what they were going to substitute for the tragic seduction of Lydia.  Obviously in a contemporary setting, a simple seduction of an overt (and adult) Party Girl was not going to have much of an impact.  The believable modern "incident" actually used instead both surprised me, and provided the right level of social threat.

Scattered throughout are various shout-outs to P&P and other works, mostly from Austen, but a few from others of the period.  I especially liked the "muddy dresses" line, Georgiana's recommendation to Darcy about how to relax, and the subtle mention of "first impressions."

Overall a great addition to the genre.  I'd rank this one just below the A&E production.

Final note: If you watch this, note that there's a LOT more than just the sequence of Lizzie's videos.  You might skip some of the extras in Twitter or Tumblr, etc., but must not skip the interspersed videos from other characters.  You can see the complete list of main story-line videos in story-time sequence here.

More later...