Netflix released the first trailer on Wednesday for Pride and Prejudice, its new limited series take on Jane Austen’s most beloved novel, and it puts Emma Corrin and Jack Lowden front and center as Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy. The preview opens with Elizabeth and her older sister Jane, played by Freya Mavor, stretched out on a rooftop and talking over the narrow futures waiting for young women in their world, before it settles into the charged, slow-burning courtship that readers have loved for more than two centuries.
For anyone meeting the story for the first time, Elizabeth is the sharp, funny second of five Bennet sisters in a family whose home and income will pass outside the family unless the girls marry well. Darcy is the wealthy, proud newcomer who rubs her the wrong way on sight, and their sparring slowly turns into something neither of them expected. It is the template that so many romantic comedies still follow, which is exactly how writer Dolly Alderton describes the book. She calls it “the blueprint for romantic comedy.”
The supporting cast is stacked. Olivia Colman plays the girls’ mother, Mrs. Bennet, with Rufus Sewell as the dry, wry Mr. Bennet, and Fiona Shaw is the formidable Lady Catherine de Bourgh. Freya Mavor plays Jane, Daryl McCormack is Darcy’s warm friend Mr. Bingley, and Louis Partridge plays the charming Mr. Wickham. According to Variety, the six-part series is being billed as a faithful adaptation of Austen’s 1813 novel, keeping the story in its 19th-century setting.
Alderton, the author of Everything I Know About Love, writes and executive produces the series, and Euros Lyn, who directed Heartstopper, directs. Corrin also serves as an executive producer for the first time. Alderton has admitted the assignment daunted her at first. She told Netflix’s Tudum that her immediate reaction to the offer was that she absolutely could not do it, because this is everyone’s favorite book and the responsibility felt too big. She came around, she said, once she started thinking about “the honor and the privilege of being entrusted with this story.”
Austen published Pride and Prejudice in 1813, and screen versions have kept coming ever since, from the 1995 BBC series with Colin Firth to the 2005 film with Keira Knightley. This is Netflix’s turn with the story, told across six episodes rather than a single film, with room to let the whole Bennet household breathe.
The series premieres December 3, so the wait is a short one. The next few weeks should bring reviews and a fuller sense of how Corrin and Lowden play two of literature’s most argued-over lovers, and whether this Elizabeth and Darcy join the versions fans measure all the others against.