With an admission of both extreme reboot fatigue and the BCC mini series P&P being my chosen fave of the lot, I'm very okay with having recently seen gobs of Olivia Colman in Wicker and calling it good. 

(Also, do go see Wicker. A delightful, hilarious, old-fashioned folk fairy tale, modernized just enough. And the noise Wicker Husband makes as he moves is really something in a theater.)

Something I'd like to understand (really, not in a rhetorical-question way) is this.

People are very happy with an endless series of varying presentations of some of the greatest works of fiction ever written. They are also very happy with an endless series of presentations of some of the greatest musical works ever written. There are people whose entire careers are dedicated to doing both these things, and they get long obituaries in serious papers when they die: this is a very respectable trade.

But for other very great works of fiction, presented in other media, many people think that there is a single definitive presentation, and that other presentations are merely 'reboots'. They will go so far as to say they should not be made, and become especially irate if they deviate from what they regard as the 'correct historical setting', which usually means the setting of the anointed presentation, which is often not very like the actual historical setting of the work. The only acceptable alternate presentations are ones which do not use the original text at all, but merely its ideas and plot.

So I'll say what I think: just as Romeo and Juliet bears endless productions – on stage, in modern dress, on screen, on screen in modern dress, set to music and so on, infinitely – so does Pride and Prejudice, in a similar endless variety.

The claim that, well, Shakespeare wrote for an endless series of productions is simply false: he wrote for a specific group of people in a single theatre, for a season or two. He had no idea that his play would still exist or would still be produced more than four hundred years later.

To assert that there is a single, canonical, screen version of any of Austen's works is, I think, insulting to her: she was as great an author as Shakespeare, and like Shakespeare she bears endless reinterpretation. The recent film of Sense and Sensibility was a very fine film. It's set in a version of the early 19th century which is not the one Austen lived in, but so what: if you think that women wearing their hair down should be forbidden in presentations of Austen's work then, well.

The upcoming series may or may not be good (it's Netflix, so I have my doubts). But, please, stop the 'no reboots' thing: it's insulting to Jane Austen.

In considering this further (thanks to Tim Bradshaw comments!) I'll clarify my anti-re-boot-ness: I'm a big fan when it involves re-staging or contextualizing of the original themes of a great work. I loved Clueless and Baz Luhrmann's Romeo + Juliet. Or Cuaron's Great Expectations (apparently the 90s was the big time for contemporary stagings/rebootings). But there's an cost associated with services like Netflix putting money into slightly-tweaked retellings rather than investing in new original productions. It's not totally either/or but the money isn't unlimited. I guess that's what bothers me more than the recycling or reinterpretation of the themes. Maybe if it were Pride & Prejudice set in 2156 on Mars I'd feel better about it?!  

There's also the fantastic queer adaption Fire Island which holds a very special place in my heart <3

Loving loving loving this discussion….