Why pay for Netflix's Pride and Prejudice when the BBC's is free on YouTube?
Three weeks before Netflix premieres its new Darcy, the BBC posted the entire 1995 Colin Firth series on YouTube. Free. The timing is either an accident or a declaration of war.
The BBC has put the whole of Pride and Prejudice (1995) — all six episodes of the Colin Firth and Jennifer Ehle series — on YouTube, free, via its BBC Playback channel for US viewers, with UK viewers pointed to iPlayer. The r/janeausten thread announcing it needed four words to name the stakes:
"BBC: 'Netflix, hold my ~~beer~~ tea.'"
The tea in question: Netflix's own six-part Pride and Prejudice — Emma Corrin as Elizabeth, Jack Lowden as Darcy, Olivia Colman as Mrs. Bennet, from Dolly Alderton's adaptation — premieres December 3. Which means the new Darcy now launches into a world where the consensus-greatest screen Darcy of all time sits one browser tab away, at a price of zero.
Competing with a ghost is easy. Competing with a free ghost isn't.
Every Austen adaptation competes with the memory of 1995; that's survivable, because memory flatters and fades. What Netflix's version has to survive now is different: live, frame-by-frame comparison. Every viewer lukewarm on the new Elizabeth can check the original's version of the same scene before the episode is even over, and every "is the lake scene in it?" debate now ends with a link.
The 1995 series isn't a nostalgic benchmark anymore. It's an active competitor in the same marketplace, holding the one price Netflix can't match.
And the BBC isn't stopping at one series. The same thread catalogued what Playback has been shoveling onto YouTube, and it reads like a raid on the whole genre:
"Along with the 2005 version, Mansfield Park, bbc S&S, 1995 bbc Persuasion, North & South, etc omg, it's endless!"
— a commenter on r/janeausten
Whether or not anyone at the BBC timed this against Netflix's launch, it lands as counter-programming: the corporation that owns the costume-drama canon putting the entire canon on the open internet right as a rival spends tens of millions re-adapting its crown jewel.
Netflix will start charging for its Darcy on December 3. The 1995 one went up three weeks earlier, free — and he's Colin Firth.
None of this means the new series is doomed; Pride and Prejudice is the most resilient property in English literature, and Corrin, Lowden, and Colman are not a cast you bet against lightly. But the launch math has changed.
Don't miss: Mansfield Park is Jane Austen's least-loved novel. Russell Brand's sentence just made it her most relevant
The question in every household on December 3 used to be "is the new one good?" It is now "is the new one better than the free one?" — and the free one has been undefeated since 1995. Watch the classic this weekend, and let Netflix prove in three weeks that you needed both.
Previously we wrote: When Harry Met Sally's original ending has no New Year's Eve speech in it at all