Emma (1996, ITV)

Confusingly, 1996 produced two unrelated screen versions of Emma within months of each other. This is not the glossy Miramax film with Gwyneth Paltrow that reached American theaters that August — it is a British television production, made for ITV and the American cable network A&E, that aired that November with an entirely different cast, director, and screenwriter. If you came here looking for the Paltrow film, it has its own entry; this page covers the other one.

Quick facts

First broadcast	24 November 1996, ITV
Runtime	110 minutes
Director	Diarmuid Lawrence
Screenplay	Andrew Davies
Producers	A&E Networks, United Film & Television Productions, Meridian Broadcasting
Budget	£2.5 million

Two Emmas, one year

The coincidence was real and, at the time, a genuine source of press confusion: Douglas McGrath’s theatrical Emma with Paltrow opened in the United States in August 1996, and this ITV/A&E television film with Beckinsale followed in Britain that November before airing in the United States in early 1997. Neither production was aware of, or responding to, the other — they were developed independently, and their near-simultaneous release was coincidence rather than competition by design. The two versions are now the standard example cited whenever people discuss how the same Austen novel can receive two unconnected adaptations in a single calendar year, alongside the loosely related but tonally distant Clueless, also released in this period as a modern-dress reworking of the same story.

Andrew Davies’ reading

Davies, who had adapted the BBC’s 1995 Pride and Prejudice the year before, brings a similar approach here: dialogue expanded and sharpened beyond Austen’s own lines, and a more overt focus on the economic and class pressures that sit underneath the novel’s comedy of manners. Reviewers have generally described this version as the harder-edged of the two 1996 Emmas — Beckinsale’s Emma reads as more snobbish and more visibly flawed in the early episodes, which makes her growth into self-awareness after the Box Hill humiliation land as a more definite change than the gentler arc McGrath’s film gives Paltrow. Some critics have found Davies’ script’s emphasis on class distinction to overshadow the lighter comic register the novel also carries, and a few have singled out weaker chemistry between the romantic leads than the reviews for the Paltrow-Northam pairing.

Cast notes

Mark Strong, well before his later career as a go-to screen villain, plays Mr. Knightley as an unusually stern, exacting figure — a reading that emphasizes the age and authority gap the novel describes rather than softening it into pure romantic warmth. Samantha Morton’s Harriet Smith and Prunella Scales’ Miss Bates were both well received, and Olivia Williams’ Jane Fairfax gives the character more visible interiority than the part usually gets in adaptations that treat her as mostly a plot device for the Frank Churchill secret. The production won two Emmy Awards for its craft work, recognition that places it alongside the more heavily publicized Paltrow film as a genuinely well-regarded, not merely a lesser-known, screen Emma.

Which one should you watch first

Neither version is more “correct” than the other, but they serve different tastes. The Paltrow film is warmer, funnier, and less interested in the novel’s undercurrent of financial and social anxiety — a good first Emma for viewers who want comedy of manners without much edge. This Beckinsale/Davies television version is the one to reach for if you want a reading closer to the novel’s sharper class consciousness, delivered at a slightly longer runtime that leaves more room for Highbury’s supporting cast. Readers can compare both against the novel itself or the plot summary to see which adaptation choices each film makes.