Sense and Sensibility (2008)

By 2008, Andrew Davies had already reshaped how the BBC adapted Austen once, with his 1995 Pride and Prejudice. His Sense and Sensibility, a three-part serial directed by John Alexander and produced by Anne Pivcevic, applies the same method to a novel that had, by then, an acclaimed film version already in circulation — and deliberately goes back to material that film left out.

Production and broadcast

The serial aired on BBC One across three episodes, from 1 to 13 January 2008, co-produced with the American public broadcaster WGBH Boston for its Masterpiece strand. It was shot on location across Berkshire, Surrey, Buckinghamshire, and Devon over roughly two months in spring 2007.

Cast

Hattie Morahan played Elinor Dashwood and Charity Wakefield played Marianne, with Dan Stevens — a handful of years before international recognition on Downton Abbey and later Legion and The Guest — as Edward Ferrars. Dominic Cooper played Willoughby and David Morrissey played Colonel Brandon. The supporting cast is unusually deep even by BBC costume-drama standards: Janet McTeer as Mrs. Dashwood, Mark Gatiss as John Dashwood, Claire Skinner as Fanny Dashwood, Linda Bassett as Mrs. Jennings, Mark Williams as Sir John Middleton, Anna Madeley as Lucy Steele, Lucy Boynton as young Margaret Dashwood, and Leo Bill as Robert Ferrars.

What Davies restores

Where Emma Thompson’s 1995 screenplay, working within a two-hour film, had to compress or cut some of the novel’s darker back-story, Davies used the three-episode format to put it back on screen. The serial opens with a scene the book only ever describes after the fact: Willoughby’s seduction and abandonment of Eliza, the young ward of Colonel Brandon, shown here directly rather than summarized secondhand. Brandon and Willoughby’s duel over Eliza — mentioned only in passing in Austen’s text — is likewise dramatized rather than skipped. The overall effect, reviewers noted at the time, is a more overtly sexual, more Gothic-tinged Sense and Sensibility than either the restrained 1995 film or the earlier BBC serials, with the Allenham scenes between Willoughby and Marianne played with more open tension than previous versions attempted.

Reception

Response to that choice was genuinely split. Several reviewers praised the restored material as giving Willoughby’s later betrayal more dramatic weight and Brandon’s protectiveness more grounding, and found the extra breathing room of three episodes let Morahan’s more visibly emotional Elinor register differently, and for some viewers more affectingly, than Thompson’s tightly controlled film performance. Others found the opening seduction scene unnecessary and the foreshadowing heavy-handed, arguing it told the audience too plainly what the novel lets unfold. Regardless of that split, the serial is generally regarded as a legitimate companion to the 1995 film rather than a redundant remake — the version to watch for viewers who want the novel’s fuller, somewhat darker context around Willoughby restored to the screen.