The Other Bennet Sister: The Pride and Prejudice spinoff is the cure for Bridgerton fatigue.

In Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, the middle sister, Mary Bennet—now the main character in the delightful, life-affirming BBC One miniseries The Other Bennet Sister that is newly streaming in the U.S. on BritBox—barely registers, save as a source of additional embarrassment for her older sisters Jane and Elizabeth, already sorely tried by their marriage-fixated mother. The canonical Mary is a person who “piqued herself upon the solidity of her reflections,” Austen writes, the “only plain one in the family” who compensates by “working hard for knowledge and accomplishments,” a person with “neither genius nor taste” whose “vanity” had “given her application” but also “a pedantic air and conceited manner.” She speaks in a pompous way, as when she decides to attend a dance and says to her family: “Society has claims on us all; and I profess myself one of those who consider intervals of recreation and amusement as desirable for everybody.” (Just say you’ll go to the dance, girl!) In the wrap-up to the novel, Austen marries off the other four sisters—beautiful Jane with Mr. Bingley, witty Lizzie with Mr. Darcy, Lydia’s shadow, Kitty, with an unnamed clergyman, flighty Lydia with the wastrel Wickham—then quickly glosses over Mary’s fate as Mrs. Bennet’s spinster companion: “As she was no longer mortified by comparisons between her sisters’ beauty and her own, it was suspected by her father that she submitted to the change without much reluctance.”

Janice Hadlow’s 2020 bestselling novel The Other Bennet Sister—a rare work of Pride and Prejudice fanfiction, in an ever-growing library of such variations, to contain almost nothing of readers’ favorite couple, Lizzie and Darcy—theorizes that Mary might have been deeply misunderstood. Mary, like the other sisters, might have found her mother absolutely awful, and might have dreaded becoming the “plain but helpful” daughter at a time when respectable “spinsters” had few other options. She might have hated floating between households as a barely welcome guest after her father’s death and the surrender of the family home to their distant cousin, Mr. Collins. Hadlow asks whether a person constantly on the losing end of “comparisons between her sisters’ beauty and her own” might actually be more marked for life than passingly “mortified,” and whether the pedantic habits Mary developed in her search for distinction should, rather than annoying us, provoke our sympathy toward a girl floating without anchor between two solid sisterly dyads, Jane/Lizzie and Kitty/Lydia.

Hadlow’s novel, some readers felt, was almost too depressing—Hadlow spends a third of it delving into the damage Mary’s family does to her, and that can make for lonely and frustrating reading. The unexpectedly popular new television adaptation, starring a near-perfect Ella Bruccoleri as Mary, solves this by compressing these earlier stretches of the novel, marrying the four sisters off early, so that we can get to the good stuff: the blooming of Mary, due in large part to the kindness of her uncle and aunt, Mr. and Mrs. Gardiner (Richard Coyle and Indira Varma). Although it’s downplayed in the show, in the novel Hadlow posits that these two relatives are freer of social convention in part because their money comes from trade, something that Mr. Gardiner’s sister Mrs. Bennet sees as shameful. Living in London, the Gardiners are also less provincial than the denizens of Meryton, hosting soirées where people play word games and indulge in raucous laughter. “In our house, no one is obliged to sparkle,” Mrs. Gardiner reassures Mary; with the pressure off, Mary, inevitably, starts to sparkle.

As the Bennets’ housekeeper, Mrs. Hill (Lucy Briers, who played Mary in the 1995 Pride and Prejudice miniseries, aka “the Colin Firth as Darcy” one), suggests she might, Mary flourishes when she can see that her nuclear family is not the whole world. It’s clear, in the few situations when Mary is forced back into proximity with her mother, how much her family dims her. We’re compensated amply for the pain of watching this by the blossoming of a new, more authentic adult friendship between Lizzie (Poppy Gilbert) and Mary, and the fact that Mrs. Bennet, as played by Ruth Jones, exudes a very funny type of unlikability. The moment when Lizzie tells her mother that they will engage a paid companion named Susan so that Mary can accompany the Gardiners on a trip to the Lake District is meme-worthy. “Am I to be looked after by a SUSAN?” Mrs. Bennet asks, in the highest of dudgeon, as even the awkward Mr. Collins makes a face.

But the show won’t work without a good Mary. Ella Bruccoleri is, of course, pretty—she’s an actress. But the show does several things to emphasize her round eyes and undainty chin. Mary wears spectacles—the bane of Mrs. Bennet, this is the device every movie or TV show uses to dim a pretty actress’s light—but the show also resists covering the blots of pink that sometimes arise on Bruccoleri’s cheeks, suggesting rosacea or similar skin irritation. Bruccoleri does the rest, squidging up her eyes and mouth, walking in an ungainly way, delivering Mary’s little bursts of pedantry with almost apologetic line readings, which make them even more annoying. In an early episode, Mary supports her mother in an argument, and her mother fusses at her anyway. “I was agreeing with you!” Mary says. “It’s the way you say things,” her mother snaps back.

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Two of the Gardiners’ friends are the men who will form the story’s love triangle, Mr. Hayward (Dónal Finn), a poetry-fancying lawyer, and Mr. Ryder (Laurie Davidson), a charismatic gadabout with some very Percy Shelley ideas about marriage. This is a love story, and the chemistry between Bruccoleri and Finn and Bruccoleri and Davidson is helium-light. But this is not a show with sex in it—the big, rewindable scenes between the two prospective couples do not involve touching. The show has been acclaimed as trad for that reason, but who cares about that; what The Other Bennet Sister’s successful execution shows is that a show like Bridgerton’s sex scenes can feel repetitive not because they’re naughty or even historically inaccurate, but because when a viewer is hoping and expecting to see a couple smash, you start to risk the nonsexual interactions feeling like filler. In The Other Bennet Sister, you have, instead, Hayward teaching Mary how to play graces, Hayward and Mary outdoing one another dorkily mimicking bird calls, or Mary and Ryder dissolving in delighted laughter on the dance floor. We’re witnessing Mary’s awakening, but not solely a sexual one—though she does admit to enjoying the look of a nice forearm. “I am so sorry that anyone has made you feel like a disappointment,” one of these men tells Mary, and it feels like the sky has opened up.

Some Austen fans find this entire Mary rehab project to be modern-minded to the point of uselessness, because Mary, as written in Pride and Prejudice, is cruelly moral in her religiosity, not, as one such objector wrote on X, “a self-insert for introverts.” Perhaps there is something to this critique; a less well-done show could feel like a craven play for relatability. (“I realized after watching the show,” said one fan on Reddit, “I identify as a Mary, though I’d love to be Lizzie.”) Luckily, The Other Bennet Sister is so breezy and full of heart, most viewers will fall for it right away. Who wouldn’t want to watch a girl who grew up gray learn to be bright?

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