The archive · Content & Film · Product decision · 2012–2013
The Lizzie Bennet Diaries: Pride and Prejudice as a year-long social media vlog
Pride and Prejudice retold as a year of YouTube vlogs with live Twitter characters — 100 episodes, 60M+ views, the first YouTube series to win a Primetime Emmy.
Pemberley Digital
What it had to solve
In 2012 an independent team asked what would happen if Pride and Prejudice took place today and Lizzie Bennet vlogged about it. They launched on YouTube with no marketing budget and no proven playbook for serialized fiction aimed at a connected audience.
How it works
The Lizzie Bennet Diaries ran 100 episodes over a year, retelling Pride and Prejudice as the video diary of a modern grad student. Lizzie vlogged about her family, Jane's romance and her collisions with William Darcy, while the rest of the cast lived on Twitter, Tumblr and Facebook as if they were real people.
The transmedia layer was the design, not a garnish: characters posted for weeks before their first on-screen appearance, replied to fans, and kept their timelines running ahead of the videos, so the storyworld felt larger than the channel. It was produced on a shoestring budget with no marketing spend, and viewers raised almost half a million dollars on Kickstarter to put it on DVD.
The show became the first YouTube-distributed series to win a Primetime Emmy, for Outstanding Creative Achievement in Interactive Media, and amassed over 60 million YouTube views. The Guardian called it the best Austen adaptation around, and the Pemberley Digital universe it launched went on to produce Emma Approved, a follow-up that integrated commerce so deeply it earned five times as fast per viewer.
Why it lands
- Characters posted on social media before they ever appeared on screen, so fans discovered a hidden layer of story that was already in place.
- Running the story in near-real time let the audience talk to characters and watch them reply, turning passive viewing into participation.
- The storyworld was spread across platforms the audience already used, so the show met fans where they lived instead of asking them to come to it.
- Zero marketing budget forced word of mouth to do the work, and the interactive world gave fans something genuinely worth evangelizing.
What it did
It became the first YouTube-distributed series to win a Primetime Emmy (Outstanding Creative Achievement in Interactive Media), drew over 60 million YouTube views with zero ad spend, and its DVD Kickstarter raised almost half a million dollars. It was the longest Pride and Prejudice adaptation in history at nine and a half hours.
What you can take
Seed characters onto the platforms your audience already inhabits and let them live before they appear on screen; a storyworld that behaves like real people earns fans who behave like a community.
Since then
Pemberley Digital continued the universe with Emma Approved — itself an Emmy winner, and built from the start to monetize the interactive layer that Lizzie Bennet couldn't — plus Welcome to Sanditon and novelizations. The series became a standard case study in transmedia storytelling courses and inspired a wave of literary web-series adaptations, though the team also learned the hard way that renting your story's home from social platforms means living with their rules.
Sources
- The Lizzie Bennet Diaries — producer's overview
- 'The Lizzie Bennet Diaries' Wins An Emmy Award
- Transmedia Shows Are Winning the Internet
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