For me, the first episode was something of an emotional rollercoaster, but probably not for the reasons Andrew Davies would have hoped for. Moments of joy at seeing Austen’s fragment brought to life were frequently overcome by outrage as the more unnecessary liberties taken with the text started to stack up.

I don’t think I can be accused of being a stickler for historical accuracy (let other pens dwell on the ‘interesting’ music and dance which closed the episode). I also wasn’t going into this viewing expecting complete ‘faithfulness’ to the text. I just hoped Austen’s fragment would be used as a jumping off point to its full potential.

The opening sequence

After a promising opening animation, my heart sank as soon as the Parkers’ carriage raced dramatically up the hill. In the text, ‘the severity of their fall was broken by their slow pace’ and the comedy lies in Mr Parker’s relentless optimism after this undignified but undramatic accident. Davies’ use of it as an opportunity to add excitement unfortunately typifies his amplifying adaptive approach.

I was willing to overlook the lazy symbolism of Charlotte being introduced while shooting rabbits (‘she’s not like other girls!’), and I was optimistic as the Heywoods were contrasted with Mr Parker.

Technical choices

The overall shape was fairly close to Austen’s fragment, although her material was exhausted before the end. With 7 episodes to go, can this series be called an adaptation, or a continuation?

I wanted to like the aesthetic, but ultimately the settings and animated backgrounds were really jarring. The transformation of Sanditon into a proto-Victorian, industrial yet fun fair aesthetic, with the beach blending seamlessly into the town, felt odd in ways that cannot be explained by historical accuracy alone. Why were there so many people at the (invented) ball, when the fragment revolves around Parker’s desperation to increase the few families at the resort? It removes the economic urgency, although presumably that will be reinstated.

My most minor niggle was Charlotte’s purchase of the blue boots. In the text, Mr Parker is excited at the “glorious” sight of “blue shoes” in a shop window as a sign that Sanditon is up-and-coming. Davies appears to have mined the text for such details, only to decontextualize them. The Charlotte of the text is too sensible to be tempted to a small purchase of jewellery, let alone blue shoes.

Austen stereotypes abound

Without Charlotte’s centralising consciousness or the mediation of Austen’s narrator, characters’ motivations were spoon-fed to the viewer through dialogue.

On Mr Heywood’s early warning to his daughter (transforming him into the archetypical disapproving, sensible father notably absent from Austen’s oeuvre), it became clear to me that this wasn’t so much an adaption of Sanditon as an attempt to cover as many Austen adaption bases as possible for the viewer’s pleasure.

I’ll give just a few examples. Lady Denham is transformed from one of the most subtle comic characters of the piece into a Lady Catherine caricature. Within her first few words, my husband declared “A Handbag!” because she reminded him of Lady Bracknell. Sidney Parker here is Mr Darcy with a twist (it’s Charlotte who offends him!). Miss Denham is initially presented as Miss Bingley 2.0, but with an added apparently incestuous relationship with her brother. Their co-dependency (with her more likely to suffer in the end) is forced on the viewer through the overt symbolism of their hair brushing scene).

Both Clara and Charlotte and reduced from two of Austen’s most savvy heroines into reactive angels, to whom things simply happen. In the fragment, ‘Clara saw through him [Sir Edward] and had no intention of being seduced’, but here she seems aware of, yet resigned to, her fate.

Charlotte’s rabbit shooting makes her a Catherine Moreland style naïve exuberant, fond of boys’ plays, and this is combined with a Lizzie Bennett-lite enthusiasm for the ‘stimulating’. Charlotte is later explicitly labelled as the naïve country heroine (common in other novels of this period) which Austen states that she is not. She has read her Burney, and ‘she had not Camilla’s youth, and had no intention of having her distress’

My conclusion…

I expected to take more issue with the “sexing up” of Sanditon than I really did. In context, the sea bathing nudity seemed fairly unobjectionable.

What I really struggled with is the choice to waste some of Austen’s best comic material. Diana and Arthur Parker who could provide laugh-out-loud comedy are reduced to a forgettable woman and a stereotypical “funny” character whose fatness is the butt of the joke, not his ignorance. Although Austen herself found fat jokes funny (see Mrs Musgrove), I don’t see a reason to add them into a 21^st century adaptation.

Not all of the changes Davies made were for the worse. Interesting additions included the implied history between Miss Lambe and Sidney Parker, and the decision to increase her role in the text will no doubt provide much of the material for the 7 following episodes.

My judgements were coloured by expecting an adaption. Perhaps now that the plot will move on from Austen’s fragment, I can enjoy it as more of an easy-watching period drama.