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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.”
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.
