BritBox’s The Other Bennet Sister — the ten-part continuation of Pride and Prejudice told from Mary Bennet’s point of view — will receive a special screening at the ATX TV Festival 2026 in Austin, Texas, the festival announced earlier this spring. The screening, part of the festival’s Season-15 programming on May 28–31, is the most significant U.S. industry showcase yet for the year’s breakout Austen-adapted period drama.
The series, adapted by Sarah Quintrell from Janice Hadlow’s 2020 novel of the same name and lead-directed by Jennifer Sheridan, premiered on BBC One in two five-episode batches on March 15 and 29, 2026, drawing a consolidated 28-day audience of 7.3 million viewers for episode one. It arrived in the United States on BritBox on May 6, with new episodes dropping each Wednesday through the June 24 finale.
Mary — the moralising middle Bennet daughter, sandwiched between Jane, Elizabeth, Kitty, and Lydia — has been a punchline in Pride and Prejudice criticism for two centuries. Hadlow’s 2020 novel was a corrective project: giving Mary the interior life Austen never wrote on the page. Quintrell’s ten-part adaptation extends that argument into prestige television.
The first two episodes retell Pride and Prejudice from Mary’s perspective — the same Netherfield ball, the same Hunsford parsonage, the same Pemberley letter, all seen from the chair Mary actually sat in. The remaining eight episodes are entirely new material: Mary’s life in London under the Gardiners, her travels in the Lake District, and the slow-burn romance the series refuses to telegraph from the pilot.
“The series pulls off the neat trick of convincingly expanding on Jane Austen while standing proudly on its own two feet.”
“Immensely charming and thoughtful, The Other Bennet Sister makes up for its sluggish pace with a bold feminist narrative and a delightful lead.”
The ATX TV Festival, now in its fifteenth season, is the closest thing American television has to its own annual writer-driven Sundance — less about premieres than about long-form, on-the-record conversations with showrunners, writers, and casts. Special screenings at ATX have historically launched the U.S. critical conversation around BBC and BritBox imports (most recently Slow Horses, Industry, and Andrew Davies’s Sanditon).
For The Other Bennet Sister, the festival slot lands at the optimal moment: three weeks into the U.S. weekly release, with reviews collected and audiences still discovering the show. The festival has confirmed the screening; the exact day and panelist list are still being finalised at press time.
The screening sits inside what is already shaping up as one of ATX’s most-watched festival weeks: alongside the 30th-anniversary Everybody Loves Raymond reunion (with Ray Romano and Phil Rosenthal), the 20th-anniversary Friday Night Lights reunion (receiving the festival’s 2026 Texas Made Award), the 10th-anniversary Sweet/Vicious reunion, a Homicide: Life on the Street episode deep-dive, and the inaugural Indie TV Pilot Competition.
Our editorial team will be in the audience for the ATX screening as ordinary festival attendees, not credentialed press. Within 48 hours of the screening we’ll publish:
• A full report on the panel conversation — what was said in the room, and by whom, recorded from the audience.
• A side-by-side analysis of how the screened episode compares to the corresponding chapters of Hadlow’s novel.
• An updated entry in our long-running Austen Adaptations tracker, with full critical scoring and links to every available review.
• Cross-published on-the-floor coverage at tvreviewer.com, our prestige-TV sister site.
The ATX coverage is being built as the public record we’ll submit with our 2027 ATX TV Festival media application. We’ve been writing about Austen on screen for thirty years; the goal next year is press access on the floor.
The Other Bennet Sister coverage is the lead feature this week across our family of Austen- and Firth-dedicated sites — nine independent properties with a combined twenty-five years of continuous Austen-on-screen reporting.
Plus prestige-TV criticism at tvreviewer.com — where the full quoted-critics round-up for The Other Bennet Sister currently sits in the “Just published” slot.
The 2026 Austen-on-screen calendar is unusually busy: alongside The Other Bennet Sister, Netflix’s new Emma Corrin and Jack Lowden Pride and Prejudice is in production for late-2026/early-2027 release. Sanditon is finalising its run. And the Andrew Davies–Colin Firth 1995 BBC Pride and Prejudice — still the load-bearing reference point for every conversation about Austen on television — turns thirty in September.
If 2025 was the year of the 250th-birthday retrospectives, 2026 is shaping up as the year of the continuations and reimaginings. The Other Bennet Sister’s ATX screening is the first major industry data point for whether that wave lands.