Ragebait Sense and Sensibility from the Hallmark Channel, which seems perverse on the face of it. The home of white-sliced drama brings us a Jane Austen adaptation peopled with black faces. Bonnets and breeches are as per, stately piles visited, manners and refinement much in evidence.
Before the purists take up their burning torches, this version does have something. Chiefly its two stars, Deborah Ayorinde and Bethany Antonia, as the sisters Austen teases mightily with suitors appropriate and inappropriate, blabbermouth cousins, silly-arse older men and busybody older women. Elinor the practical, Marianne the impetuous, which is how “sense and sensibility” translates in the 21st century, with a bit of poetic licence.
Among the suitors the handsome but dour Colonel Brandon (Akil Largie), a dashing ex soldier, and the hunky and dashing John Willoughby (Victor Hugo), both of whom have the eye for Marianne. Plus Edward Ferrars (Dan Jeannotte), who is smitten with Elinor even before she, her mother and sisters have been chased out of the house they have called home by their stepbrother, who is failing to honour his father’s dying wishes that no such thing should happen.
The Dashwood girls and their mother camp out at the home of kindly relative Sir John Middleton (Edward Bennett), where no mention is made of race. This is an interesting decision. Early on it looked as if this was going to be the hinge everything would swing on, because Elinor, Marianne, mother Mary (Susan Lawson-Reynolds) and little sister Meg (Beth Angus) are all black, while their cruel dispossessing brother John (Daniel Boyd) is white. The black people as the poor relations, you can see why someone might want to go there. But as well-to-do black characters – Brandon and Willoughby, in particular – are introduced, what looked like a black/white divide has to be retired as an idea.
Whether you call it colourblind casting or not (it’s not quite), the salient fact is that none of the black actors is playing a black character in Georgian England. How you feel about that may say more about you than it does about the 19th century.
Austen fans will mostly like it, though I suspect there will be plenty who don’t go a bundle on some of the updating of language – did anyone say “passed” for “died” back then? Did people “reach out” when they wanted to get in touch with someone? And the designer stubble on the face of Edward Ferrars, even at his wedding, what was the point of that?
The film was the last of four Austen-themed films Hallmark showed as part of their awkwardly named Loveuary strand in 2024. A tortuous marketing construction, Loveuary is what you get when you force together Love and February (the month of Valentine’s Day). Unlike the other three in the series, this film was based on an actual Austen property, though An American in Austen owed a something to her Pride and Prejudice.
This gallops along a bit faster than Jane Austen would probably have liked, but it is true to her original story. Elinor and Marianne both need men, but which one? Mr Right turns out to be Mr Wrong, or Mr Not Right Now, decent chaps turn out to be coves, rich men turn out to be paupers, friends turn out to be foes, and relatives turn out to be rivals. All Elinor and Marianne have to do is navigate their way through that lot and happiness is theirs.
Director Roger Bobb works to the demands of the advertising break, as does Tim Huddleston in his rewriting of Austen’s 1811 original. Ayorinde and Antonia have decided to play it straight down the line, as if commercial demands and other anachronisms simply weren’t there. A good decision. We either feel for these young women or the project fails to fly. I did.
Of course, some people are never going to get beyond the skin colour, which is a shame because this is a good story well told, and with acting – the men don’t fare quite so well as the women – that’s more than up to the mark. Jane Austen can sleep easy.
Sense and Sensibility – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2026
