The books of Jane Austen have been a near-bottomless source of TV and film adaptations – largely directly, but also in original works like Bridgerton that obviously draw inspiration from her.
There is another route, though, which thankfully avoids all that knowing CGI gloss, but doesn’t simply remake a familiar work: take an unexplored character from an actual Austen novel, and develop a new story around her.
That’s what Janice Hadlow did with her novel The Other Bennet Sister, now the BBC’s latest Austen spin-off, which stars Ella Bruccoleri as Mary Bennet, the younger sister of Pride and Prejudice’s Elizabeth.
Mary lacks the sparkle of her four sisters, and is constantly put down by their unpleasant mother (played here by Ruth Jones).
She has come to believe what her mother tells her – that no one will want to marry her – and steels herself for a life of dowdy servitude whose main pleasure will come from reading scientific books. But can a move to London change her mind?
The setting is familiar, with developments from the book playing out around Mary; and I suppose the plot itself, and the confining snobbery and sexism of the age, are things we’ve seen other characters live out in other adaptations.
But it doesn’t matter: this is a witty, earthy pleasure. The script is sharp, but so are the convincing sisterly body-language and unfussy settings (only a few brief city scenes look a little too clean to be real).
Most importantly, Bruccoleri is wonderful as the pained, restrained, bigly-brained Mary, blessed with a good heart but uncomfortable in her own skin and in social gatherings. You really do root for her, even if you too wish she wouldn’t take to the piano. (Though if I could make a sticky point, if the writers are going to make Mary so grammatically proper that she corrects love interests on their use of “less” and “fewer”, I think she would also know when to say “my sisters and I” and when to say “my sisters and me”.)
Scarpetta, Amazon Prime
Amazon loves long-running novel series: they can afford to make years of shows that are never more than solid, because they come with inbuilt fan bases anyway. Think of Bosch, Reacher, and Jack Ryan, for example. Now here’s Scarpetta, another one named for its main character, based on the Patricia Cornwell series that’s now 28 books long.
It’s been in the works for years, with Demi Moore and Angelina Jolie attached at different points, but it’s finally reached the screens with Nicole Kidman in the role.
Amazon seem very pleased with that. Weary TV viewers might be less excited: yes, Kidman was once taken seriously, then she went whispery, then she went, shall we just say expressionless, then she got involved almost exclusively in glossy, shallow dramas. And I suspect readers will find her less dark, feisty and Italian than the Scarpetta they’ve known for decades.
This first series comes with two separate timelines: one in which chief medical officer Kay Scarpetta is returning (after a long absence) to her old dissecting ground, and one in which she is played (very well) by Rosy McEwen as a skilled young doctor who has not yet earned her reputation.
In the present day, Scarpetta is called out to a murder which immediately recalls a very similar case from early in her career – so we follow both versions of Scarpetta on separate-but-linked cases, meeting variously aged colleagues and rivals along the way.
Those scenes work reasonably well, but no more: it’s suddenly gory for no obvious reason, then it moves to corporate chitchat with impossibly well-groomed men that you just know will get in Scarpetta’s righteous way. There’s no tension, but the possible link between the cases does keep your curiosity alive.
But we spend far too much time with Scarpetta’s domestic life, watching her bicker with her sister Dorothy (Jamie Lee Curtis). There are too many of these scenes, and they are also mostly awful too.
Perhaps in a few episodes, if we can endure that long, we will have some understanding of the characters, but to launch us right into several shrill squawkfests before we even know them, and before we’ve had a chance to invest in the crime story, is unforgivable.
And look how kind I am being: I haven’t even mentioned the laughable decision to make an AI character a major part of the plot.
There is a solid long-running series in those Scarpetta novels. But this, veering all over the place in tone and feeling distinctly MOR, is not it. It also needs a lead who appears to be actually engaged with the role; maybe Kidman is restraining herself for bigger moments later on, but early on she just gives off the flat-faced energy of someone doing a job they regret taking on: about as uninterested as you will be watching her.
SNL UK, Sky One, Saturday, 10pm
Saturday Night Live has been trundling unavoidably on in America for so long now that it’s almost become the description of American network humour: too broad and too bland, surviving only because every so often its live nature allows it to be, if not funny, at least topical.
Why has it taken 51 years for a version to arrive on this side of the Atlantic? Or perhaps, more to the point, why has it come at all?
Well, in one of the first episode’s only interesting moments, the host Tina Fey (a regular on the US version) admitted that, “Like so many large-scale US operations these days, no one really knows.”
Fey’s presence may not have helped differentiate the show from the original, but she was a safe, salty old professional, even managing an interminable call-and-response with Graham Norton that wouldn’t have been funny even if she had understood those British TV references.
The rest of it? Honestly, it was always going to struggle after a dismal opening sketch involving Keir Starmer and a Gen Z advisor.
The sketch with Attenborough was another that went on far too long, though a parody of Hamnet reminded us how up-to-date the show can be; to be clear, neither sketch was funny.
Nor did the freedom to swear – harder on US TV – help in the first episode: yes, that freedom can help give a joke teeth, but it’s far from enough on its own.
It was a relief that most of the cast were new, but by halfway through you were wondering if this whole thing is less about being funny or fulfilling the show’s potential than about being a launchpad for a new crop of comedians. Which might even be apt, since that’s another thing the original has become.
Turbulence: The Story Of Ryanair, RTÉ1, Monday, 9.35pm
RTÉ1’s Turbulence is a two-part documentary on the history of Ryanair that, you know, has no frills but does the job.
It feels odd to begin with because it starts back in the 1980s, when Michael O’ Leary wasn’t on the scene – he’s such a visible and audible CEO (love him or hate him) that it’s hard to imagine the company without him.
But actually it’s a good story, rollicked through quickly here, from its decision to challenge Aer Lingus to O’Leary’s gabby presence, to its emergence as a huge airline (I know from experience that some taxi drivers in Europe know it but don’t know Aer Lingus).
Along the way there are some views down over a very different Ireland – a weirdly staid Aer Lingus, a world where people used to put their good clothes on to drive out to the airport to watch rich people catching flights. It’s a corporate story, but worth a watch.