Jane Austen on Masterpiece Theater

Masterpiece Theater on PBS is offering up movie adaptations of Jane Austen's novels once a week for over three months! As a Jane Austen freak, this pleases me immensely--my husband and children not so much.
I watched Persuasion last Sunday. It was a version I'd not seen before. While I enjoyed the version with Ciaran Hines much more,the Sunday night broadcast offered a decent adaptation. Of course, squeezing a novel into a ninety-minute movie means that the story is put on fast forward, and the characters are drawn in extremely broad strokes, rendering even the main characters (and certainly the minor ones) as one-dimensional. When the movie strayed away from the book, the distance it wandered was considerable. At one point I found myself jumping up from couch and shouting, "There is NO KISSING in Jane Austen!"
Still, it is always a pleasant experience to visit most any version of Austen's world. If the Masterpiece Theater series encourages anyone to pick up Austen's novels again or for the first time, that's great. Just remember, the book is always better!
Here's a link to the PBS site which has a printable PDF file for the entire Masterpiece Theater schedule:
Masterpiece Theater
Here's hoping that I can keep up with blogging. I've decided to take inspiration from my beloved Jane: "...for not being overburdened with subject (having nothing at all to say), I shall have no check on my genius from beginning to end." --letter to Cassandra, Feb. 1807.