Last week, Jane Austen’s Pride And Prejudice celebrated the bicentennial of its first publication. In those 200 years, this satire of Regency-era society has been subject to dozens upon dozens of adaptations: lavish big-screen costume dramas, stage musicals, and a movie where Renee Zellweger falls down a bunch, to name a few. Its landing in the public domain has only inspired more frequently occurring takes on Austen’s tale of overcoming strong first impressions, which is how headstrong Elizabeth Bennet earned a Buffy Summers-like second life as a katana-wielding destroyer of the undead. Seth Grahame-Smith’s cute genre hybrid Pride And Prejudice And Zombies was the pop-lit sensation of 2009, but in true Night Of The Living Dead fashion, its charms were overwhelmed by the hordes of classic-lit-and-modern-horror mashups it inadvertently created.
Thankfully, a new effort has risen up to take Pride And Prejudice And Zombies’ place as the quintessentially 21st-century take on Austen’s novel: The Lizzie Bennet Diaries, a web series that tracks the story of Pride And Prejudice’s heroine through biweekly vlogs. It’s a central gimmick that directly connects the viewer to Lizzie and her expanding social circle: her sisters Jane and Lydia, best friend and editor Charlotte Lu, and the two handsome suitors toward whom the Bennets’ mother is constantly pushing her daughters, Bing Lee and William Darcy. As the series has unfolded over the course of 80-some episodes, the frantic editing and flood of exposition have fallen away to reveal a unique piece of interactive media that has a big heart and a lot of soul. It’s almost as if it’s working from the blueprint of a classic novel or something.