An Amiga and I Talk About Sanditon

       . . . . . Sanditon (2019) ITV-PBS.  8 frackin’ episodes!  How can there be that many 48 minute tv episodes from a unfinished novel that only had 12 chapters?

It premiered in the US this past Sunday night on PBS, showing the first two episodes, not just the first one. So much has been lifted whole out of other Austen novels for this series, mostly, of course, from Pride and Prejudice, particularly in the dialogue, and scenes repeating or at least referencing the 1995 BBC Pride and Prejudice.

And people talking about a second season, though ITV said it cancelled the series as not enough viewers / unenthusiastic - hostile - derisive reponse.  The UK reviewers at least, really didn’t like it – dull and tedious. Out of what could they fashion a second season anyway? 

The UK viewers also strongly objected to the depictions of sexual behavior that departed so sharply from the Austen universe as Austen depicted. The writers for Sanditon felt they MUST give us as villains, a sexually transgressive half sister-brother duo.  The bro’s a serial, violent seducer-rapist. There’s a strong suggestion of the two of them doing what even half sibs should not do, while living mostly within a room in their crumbling mansion frescoed with naked men doing ... what exactly? Really, Austen was able to show schemers determined to get All the Stuff without going that far. 

My favorite Mansfield Park, BBC 1983

Henry Crawford

Mary Crawford

The splendid Crawford brother and sister pair of Mansfield Park -- they created havoc and crossed boundaries -- certainly the brother did! -- but we see how their charm, likeability and worldly joie de vivre -- even their sophisticated sense of the comic and absurd -- allowed for their seductions, without rape and violence of that sort. These two are as interesting to the reader as they are to the the characters of Mansfield Park.

Even the way the writers did it, the pretext to get a lively but moral ingenue to this sea-side resort in the making, was hard to believe.  Really, even in those days? Responsible parents like the Heywoods would allow their adolescent daughter to go off to stay with the Parkers, people they’ve known for, o all of 5 minutes?

Even if Tom Parker is played by Kris Marshall!?* whom last I knew as the detective on Death in Paradise, who left the fictional Caribbean island of Saint Marie after two seasons, to marry his love back in London. I saw Marshall first in Love Actually (2003) as the horny Brit kid trying to get laid who travels to the US to do it. Remarkably, one of the three midwestern babes who helps him out of his virginity was January Jones, who played Betty Draper, the unpleasant first wife of Don Draper on Mad Men.  Gotta say this for Marshall the actor -- he does get around some beautiful women, over and over and over again!*

A friend writes to me about Austen's Sanditon vs. ITV-PB's Sanditon after she too watched these first two episodes on offer:

 ... Reread Sanditon. [What Austen wrote] almost fills up the first ep. The ball sequence and everything follows is invention ... also kind of Northanger Abbey ... it's [NA's] Catherine Moorland, Not Charlotte Heywood. [Austen's Sanditon's]CH was a sensible young woman of two and twenty, ie, a bit too long on the shelf but not at all a husband-hunter. It's only a fragment. but that ball sequence is PURE Catherine Moorland.

Here's the thing about Charlotte Heywood - she is an observer figure. She stands apart and judges the other characters but doesn't enter into their lives. She exhibits no romantic interest in them. (This might have changed if the book had been finished - or maybe not. It would have been an unusual and rather progressive narrative strategy.)

But this Charlotte Heywood has been buried in the TV series.

My response:

     This is all true -- and playing Charlotte as Austen wrote her would also be a most interesting acting challenge, and worth watching.

But the actor playing Charlotte isn't up to that any more than the writing is up to Austen. Writers: NO WE MUST HAVE ROMANCE! WE MUST DO ELIZABETH AND DARCY ALL OVER AGAIN ALL THE TIME BECAUSE THAT’S ALL THE LADIES ADORE AND THAT’S ALL THE LADIES KNOW.

Especially the tv Darcy and Elizabeth of 1995, which itself took some serious liberties with Austen’s Pride and Prejudice text, like Gerwig does with Alcott's Little Women. Which mostly means, at least for this Sanditon, we must squeeze in as much nekkid men as the screen can hold.

The ghastly Pineapple luncheon though, in terms of how things surely were and, tragically, the way things still are right this minute, was remarkably on the money: consider what's going on right this minute with Meghan Markle:

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/exclusive-meghan-markle-targeted-by-hundreds-of-racist-and-sexist-tweets-amid-plan-to-step-back_n_5e1f5b28c5b673621f6f7965

Plus there are so many more racist comments and actions that can rather more subtle than these and the way the hideous person Ann Reid is playing shows so well (like, that member of the royal family / court? who to meet the Duchess to be, wore a blackamoor pin). Reid's performance is far and away the best thing in the piece. The actor playing Charlotte, I saw last as the vapid Princess Clode in the last season or so of the ridiculous, non-historical period series, Reign, in which we see Mary Queen of Scots host a run-way fashion show in her Scotland castle.

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*  Woo! does that resort on the coast of England broadcast cold!  And the actors had to get in the water!  But it looked almost equally cold out of the water and inside walls.  All the actors who have played the detective on Death in Paradise have talked extensively of how difficult it is to do this series in the climate of Guadeloupe. So it was probably more pleasant for Marshall to shoot in cold England.