Sarah Quintrell On Episode 1

We just met Mary Bennet, and we’re already in love with her.

BritBox’s “The Other Bennet Sister” is a spinoff of Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice” that’s based on Janice Hadlow’s 2020 novel. The show follows Mary Bennet, sister of “Pride and Prejudice” heroine Lizzie, a character given short shrift in the original text. In her family, Mary is an afterthought, an oddball, and the least likely of Mr. and Mrs. Bennet’s five daughters to marry. At the start of the series, Mary’s mother is sure she is destined for spinsterhood, which renders the young woman sometimes invisible, other times a repository for every possible critique.

In the charming series premiere, which began streaming today, Mary (played by Ella Bruccoleri, “Call the Midwife”) struggles with — and is made to feel terrible by — courting norms in her provincial English hometown. Indeed, by the end of Episode 1, she’s crying over events that transpired at a dance. But as the show’s trailer makes clear, life gets much better for our dear girl when circumstances conspire to bring her to live in London. 

It’s striking, how incredibly wrong all of the Bennets are about Mary, and how quickly the audience hews to her to her side. “For me, what was important was that the audience could connect to Mary,” series writer/executive producer Sarah Quintrell tells TVLine. “I truly believe that in all of us women, there is a part of us that feels we don’t live up to the standards that have been set by society, that we don’t live up to these values, that there’s always something that we’re striving to reach, and we can’t.”

In the premiere, “she’s desperately trying to work out how she can be good enough. And as soon as you get her there, as soon as you see that vulnerability, you absolutely connect to her,” Quintrell continues. “You love her, and you’re rooting for her.”

That said, Mary is no “Bridgerton”-esque diamond in the rough. “She’s a pedant. She says the wrong thing. She can’t ride a horse. She can’t sing,” the EP says, laughing. “She’s not your average Regency woman. And I thought: I’m not dumbing that down. We are absolutely going with it.”

New episodes of “The Other Bennet Sister” drop Wednesdays on BritBox. Did you watch the series premiere? Let us know what you thought about it in the comments!