Ella Bruccoleri in 'The Other Bennet Sister.' Courtesy of the BBC/BritBox Logo text Robert Schildhouse, BBC Studios’ highest-ranking exec in the U.S., first met Jane Tranter at a coffee shop in Times Square. The prolific British producer, now CEO of her own production company, Bad Wolf, was in town for the season three premiere of HBO’s Industry. But it was another U.K.-set show that she was keen to run past the BritBox chief: a cosy, quietly revolutionary adaptation of Janice Hadlow’s best-selling novel The Other Bennet Sister.
“I walked out of that meeting saying, ‘Okay, we have to do this show,'” Schildhouse remembers about that initial meet-up with Tranter. “And now, there’s a billboard in Times Square with Mary Bennet on it.”
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The Other Bennet Sister — a BBC and BritBox co-production — has been a triumph for every involved party. Its March release on the BBC became the biggest launch of a new drama in the U.K. across all platforms and streamers in a year, with a consolidated audience of 7.3 million (over half of them watching on iPlayer). Then came its BritBox debut on May 6: a record-breaking performance that drove five times the amount of new subscribers as any other prior launch on the platform. More than a third of BritBox’s active subscribers, a number totaling over around 1.5 million, The Hollywood Reporter understands, watched the series in its first two weeks.
“It’s safe to say it’s the biggest thing that we’ve ever done,” beams Schildhouse. “We’re seeing it pop up and be covered in places that have never talked about BritBox. The reviews, [from] critics and audiences, have exceeded anything we’ve ever done before. We couldn’t be happier.”
The 10-part TOBS, written by Sarah Quintrell, follows the forgotten Bennet sister of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, whose move from Longbourn to London offers the wallflower a chance to break free from society’s — and her family’s — rather anti-feminist constraints. At the top of the call sheet is a charming Ella Bruccoleri in a performance that has won the hearts of Brits and Americans alike, with a supporting ensemble including Ruth Jones as Mrs Bennet, Richard E. Grant as Mr Bennet, and Dónal Finn and Laurie Davidson as Mary’s competing suitors. Cue a raft of social media fancams showing a blushing Mary Bennet being pursued by her handsome, Regency-era bachelors. Each one accrues millions of views and hundreds of thousands of likes.
Now, the popularity of the show has fueled something of a breakout moment for the BBC Studios-owned BritBox, a streaming service that self-identifies as a cultural bridge connecting British creators and storytelling with North American audiences. They took their biggest swing yet with TOBS, an ambitious adaptation paired with a hefty marketing campaign — “we put a lot of resources behind making sure that people knew that this show existed” — and have come out boasting an invaluable USP in an oversaturated market.
“We don’t have a consumer-facing brand in the U.K., but within the British television industry, we’ve become this critical player that can actually get television shows made,” continues Schildhouse about what a co-production with BritBox can offer the cash-strapped public broadcasters in the U.K. “There’s a lack of risk-taking that’s happening with distributors and studios — for good reason — and without a North America partner, there are shows that have been greenlit [but] struggle to find the financing model to get made. We have ascended into this very critical role. There aren’t others who are as aggressive as we’ve become in helping to finance the next wave of British television.”
Laurie Davidson and Ella Bruccoleri in ‘The Other Bennet Sister.’ Courtesy BBC/BritBox/Bad Wolf The platform’s unique position in the industry allows BritBox, per Schildhouse, to “play very nicely” with the U.K.’s talent-rich PSBs. “We don’t have a U.K. proposition, so there isn’t a world where we’re going to take out global rights and we’re going to be in competition for them in the market that matters to them. We are set up as an ideal partner for public service broadcasters to want to work with.” It’s not just the PSBs, either — they’ve set up bundles with Starz, MGM+, and Hallmark+ on Prime Video, as well as a programming pop-up of BritBox shows on HBO Max.
Tranter says that BritBox’s collaborative strategy showcases “exactly what the big, merged American television market needs.” She explains: “BritBox is like this plucky outsider that can still get out there and manage to speak to large audiences. They said to us, ‘In the delivery of this show, you did everything you said you would.’ And they did exactly the same to us. They told us they would support it, they told us it would be the jewel in their crown… And The Other Bennet Sister has very literally been loved onto the screen by everyone who worked on that show at Bad Wolf, the BBC and BritBox.”
The proof is, well, in the 19th-century pudding: The week ending May 18 was the highest week of signups on BritBox ever, entirely driven by The Other Bennet Sister. Schildhouse says their bold, aggressive moves in the co-production space have now finally paid off: “We have been taking bigger swings for some time now. I think this is the biggest we’ve taken, but we have some other very significant shows coming up on our slate. We’re upping the ante, because we have incredible conviction in the quality of our programming.”
This is another weapon at their disposal: a catalogue of beloved British storytellers who wield just as much cultural power across the Atlantic. For example, BritBox’s dedicated programming collection Austen Forever, launched last year, that houses classics such as Pride & Prejudice, Emma, Sense and Sensibility and Persuasion. This bundle is, naturally, now headlined by TOBS. The service is also North America’s home to the work of Agatha Christie after inking a deal with the late author’s estate; its territory exclusives include shows Murder is Easy, Why Didn’t They Ask Evans? and Towards Zero.
“British isn’t a genre,” says Schildhouse about the commitment to crime, mystery, period dramas and literary adaptations. “[But] we have really focused our attention on areas where British television is distinctive and stands out globally,” he continues. “Mystery is a category where we spend a lot of our effort and resources, and a lot of our subscribers care deeply about that.”
He lauds the work of PBS with the enduring period hit Downton Abbey. “Downton Abbey was the first British television show to really break through into the popular zeitgeist, into this market, but [was] amplified through the dawn of streaming, so there’s this really tight association between the British period piece and British television,” he says. “We do veer outside of that a bit, but if there’s an opportunity to create an accessible on-ramp, I think The Other Bennet Sister is an example of a show that lives in our existing lanes, and [yet] has an opportunity to help us introduce BritBox to a whole new audience.”
That’s the name of the game here, of course — how BritBox keeps the onslaught of new customers who signed up to watch TOBS and now find themselves at the foot of 8,000 hours of programming they’ve likely never seen before. Schildhouse is admittedly a roll-out purist and advocate of the week-by-week episodic drop (the TOBS finale will air June 24), but their premium subscription tier, BritBox Premier, gives dedicated fans early access to episodes, among other perks. The success of the tier has exceeded expectations. “It now represents over 10 percent of our owned and operated subscriber base, and we’ve been in [that] market for less than a year. But the success is on this show. The Other Bennet Sister has been extraordinary, because people are coming in and say, ‘Okay, I have to see it all now.’ It’s just that good,” says Schildhouse.
Tranter considers what it is about Mary Bennet that’s cut through the noise. “I really feel that part of the strength of the response to the piece is that it’s about kindness and it’s about inclusivity,” she decides. “Mary has her own version of womanhood, and that is a really important part of getting a story out there. Who are we to say that women should look or feel or sound or be like this? They are who they want to be, and I love that.”
She praises BritBox for tapping into an audience so diverse. “They must have done to get figures like that. They’ve gone way beyond, ‘Well, only the British want to watch this.’ Just think about all the people who watched Downton Abbey all those years ago. I think if you genuinely get a big audience, it is going to burst outside of that capsule.” The former controller of fiction at the BBC adds that the breadth of the TOBS fanbase surpasses Downton. “The number of older men, 60 plus, 70 plus, who have said just how much they’ve appreciated it… It’s just thrilling to see Mary so talked about.”
Schildhouse is more than aware that they’re a specialty service with a smaller footprint than the general entertainment streamers in the U.S. But their business models, he maintains, are incomparable. While other streamers chase scale, BritBox is betting on the power of owning a highly loyal cultural landscape through that low-churn, high-engagement approach. “We have been able to grow an incredibly profitable business at the scale that we’re at just by being very deliberate and thoughtful about where we allocate our resources, both on content and marketing. We are almost surgical in terms of the precision and how we think about both our content and marketing strategies.”
That precision has left them with newfound respect from British talent, too. Schildhouse says some of the biggest names in the industry love working with the platform. “We can be honest,” he says, “once upon a time, for talent and producers, the idea that their show would go to BritBox… [It was] seen as a niche streamer, whatever you want to call it. It’s completely changed. We take exceptional care of talent and producers. The number of submissions that we’re getting from the top tier of producers in the U.K. marketplace is multiple of where we were just a few years ago.”
CEO, direct to consumer at BBC Studios Robert Schildhouse and Bad Wolf CEO Jane Tranter. Courtesy of BritBox He’s now keen to ride the tailwind of British television’s Hollywood renaissance and reputation for prestige storytelling, citing the recent awards success of Adolescence and Baby Reindeer, made on U.K. turf by U.K. creatives. Code of Silence, a co-production between BritBox and ITV, just won the BAFTA TV Award for best drama series. It’s escapism, another world — but still accessible, Schildhouse says about the U.K. and its place in American culture. “Americans find British wit incredibly charming. And we care about craft. I have a hypothesis that human beings are going to want to know that their shows are handmade. In a world of AI slop,” he continues, “these are people who care deeply about the craft of acting and storytelling, and every single British actor I’ve ever interacted with went to drama school.”
Through all the excitement, execs at BritBox are keeping calm and carrying on. Alongside a newly-launched podcast, On the Box, they have big plans to capitalize on the doors that TOBS has opened. They now set their sights on Tommy & Tuppence, another Christie adaptation arriving this year with Imelda Staunton, season two of Ludwig, as well as Endless Night, which will see them re-team with the BBC. “This is a proof point for us that we can go big or bigger than we’ve ever gone before, and audiences will respond to it,” adds the BBC Studios executive. “We have shows that we’re not yet ready to talk about that I think will be incredibly exciting.”
But fans will also be undoubtedly keen to know if a certain Austen heroine is getting her second instalment. “You don’t make something like this, where people respond to it in a particular way, without thinking, ‘Okay, what else can we do?'” teases Tranter on TOBS. “We’re definitely having a think about it. That’s all I can say at the moment.”
And what might be most important of all is the approval of Hadlow, who tells THR that the success has been “amazing to see, both in the U.K. and on BritBox.” She added: “I think Bad Wolf’s adaptation of my book is brilliant, with a wonderful script, a fantastic cast — Ella Bruccoleri is Mary exactly as I imagined her.”
The Other Bennet Sister is now available to watch on BritBox.
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