Since it premiered last month, Netflix’s deeply unsettling original series Something Very Bad Is Going To Happen has been a hit with both critics and viewers.

While early reviews for the eight-part horror show were mostly positive, the show itself has been hugely popular with Netflix users, consistently hovering around the top of the platform’s most-watched list ever since it premiered.

The series centres around a young couple gearing up for their wedding day, who are confronted with a series of increasingly horrific bumps in the road that leave them questioning everything about their relationship.

Horror fans have a seemingly-endless plethora of films to pick from when they’re looking for something new to watch, but when it comes to TV, there are considerably fewer offerings from the genre.

With that in mind, if you’ve already made your way through Something Very Bad Is Going To Happen and you’re looking for a new chilling binge-watch, we’ve rounded up 11 horror-centric TV shows available to stream now…

Alright, we’re starting with the biggie – you can’t have a conversation about horror on TV without discussing American Horror Story.

With 12 iterations to pick from (varying in quality, it has to be said), the anthology series takes place in a completely different time and setting each time around, with many of the same actors playing all new characters from season to season.

High points include the camp-tastic witchiness of Coven, the sheer vampiric glamour of Hotel, the grit of NYC, the politically-charged Cult, the terrifying pinnacle of Asylum or the one that started it all, terrifying domestic drama Murder House.

Later this year, American Horror Story will return for its landmark 13th run, with franchise staples Sarah Paulson, Jessica Lange, Evan Peters, Angela Bassett and Kathy Bates all returning alongside new addition Ariana Grande.

A love letter to the slasher genre, Scream Queens was another of Ryan Murphy’s attempts at creating a TV horror, serving as a tongue-in-cheek meeting point of Scream, Halloween, Mean Girls and Heathers.

The dark comedy starred Murphy-verse regular Emma Roberts as clique leader Chanel Oberlin, with appearances from Glee alum Lea Michele, Oscar nominee Abigail Breslin and aforementioned American Horror Story newbie Ariana Grande.

While the show didn’t quite live up to the scale of previous Murphy projects like Glee or American Horror Story, it developed a cult following over the course of its two seasons in the mid-2010s.

Murphy tried his hand at horror once again during a fallow year for American Horror Story in 2024, that was every bit as star-studded as you’d come to expect from the TV super-producer.

While the principal actors included Niecy Nash-Betts, Lesley Manville and Nicholas Alexander Chavez (who, at the time, was fresh from his work as Lyle Menendez in the true crime anthology Monster), it also made use of some bold stunt casting, most notably marking the acting debut of one Travis M. Kelce.

The sinister series centres around a detective who teams up with a nun to get to the bottom of a series of crimes affecting their community, only for things to take an increasingly creepy turn.

Alright, one more Ryan Murphy show and then we promise we’re done.

Previous iterations of the Monster anthology series were more grisly true crime explorations than outright horror, but the graphic violence and gore of The Ed Gein Story definitely took the show in an even more frightful direction.

Gein’s crimes are believed to have been the inspiration for horror films like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and The Silence Of The Lambs – not to mention Psycho, with director Alfred Hitchcock and actor Anthony Perkins appearing in Monster’s third season as minor characters, in a B-story about the creation of the iconic film.

A TV off-shoot of the Andy Muschietti adaptations of Stephen King’s tome It has no right being as good as it is.

The critically-acclaimed prequel explores the seemingly cursed town’s origins, and how Pennywise began terrorising its residents by exploiting their deepest fears and anxieties for its own gain long before the events of It.

Gripping though it might be, Welcome To Derry is also really scary, so just prepare yourself for that.

Stream it on: Now, Sky and HBO Max

One for fans of gothic horror, The Fall Of The House Of Usher is a loose retelling of the Edgar Allen Poe short story set in the modern day, which incorporates other popular stories from the classic author’s oeuvre along the way including The Raven and The Tell-Tale Heart.

While the source material is one of the most famous haunted house tales ever, this new version is more in line with Succession or Industry, focussing on a wealthy family in charge of a corrupt pharmaceutical company Fortunato Pharmaceuticals, which befalls a series of mysterious tragedies in quick succession.

The Fall Of The House Of Usher creator Mike Flanagan is no stranger to horror, though, previously overseeing the anthology series The Haunting for Netflix.

Back in 2018, The Haunting Of Hill House proved to be absolute nightmare fuel, as siblings return to their haunted childhood home to confront their past demons (including the deeply upsetting Bent-Neck Lady) once and for all.

Like with American Horror Story, follow-up The Haunting Of Bly Manor featured several of the same actors in a whole new – but just as terrifying – haunted house setting.

Best known as the auteur behind the expansive and surreal films Pan’s Labyrinth, The Devil’s Backbone, The Shape Of Water and, more recently, Frankenstein, Guillermo Del Toro has made a shift to TV work in the 2010s.

As well as his Tales Of Arcadia series with Netflix, in 2022, he put out the anthology miniseries Cabinets Of Curiosity.

Each episode of the eight-part miniseries told its own stand-alone story (in the style of The Twilight Zone or Black Mirror) hosted by the Oscar-winning filmmaker himself, with instalments putting a new spin on horror tropes like paintings coming to life, demonic conjurings and unrelenting ghosts from the past.

Look out for appearances from Harry Potter’s Rupert Grint, The White Lotus’ F Murray Abraham and Downton Abbey’s Dan Stevens, among others.

While perhaps not a horror in the traditional sense, Stranger Things incorporates elements from the genre (particularly from films that popped off in the 1980s, when the show is set) alongside sci-fi, mystery, action and traditional coming-of-age teen dramas.

There are also countless several deliberate homages to Stephen King over the course of its five seasons, with the horror author previously giving the show his personal seal of approval.

Dystopian anthology series Black Mirror is probably most well-known as the show that warns about the perils of technology and social media – but make no mistake that when it decides to go full horror, it can really get in your head.

Among its most frightening offerings include early offerings White Bear, Men Against Fire, Playtest and Metalhead, plus the deliberate horror homages of Demon 79 and Loch Henry.

Meanwhile, even the more allegorical stories like Be Right Back, The Entire History Of You and the “Christmas special” White Christmas will leave you with a chill that lingers longer than you might think.

Then again, maybe you prefer your frights a little less on the disturbing side.

Streaming service Disney+ currently has two stand-alone series based on those R.L. Stine books that had you hiding under the covers back in the 90s, telling two distinct stories that make for more family-friendly viewing than every other suggestion we’ve laid out here.

President Donald Trump has survived political scandals, crises and low approval ratings the likes of which no previous president could withstand. So it may be hard to believe that ol’ Donny Trump won’t, yet again, wriggle his way out of another disastrous drop in his political standing.

But this time it really may be different.

Trump’s Iran war has, even more than anything before, sent his approval rating in a nosedive. Poll aggregators now put him below 40% approval for the first time in his second term as multiple polls have shown his approval in the low-to mid-30s. His net approval is at -21.4, according to FiftyPlusOne.

“When compared to past presidents, Trump’s ratings are the lowest of any president at this point in their term, going back to FDR,” pollster G. Elliott Morris wrote at his Strength In Numbers site on Friday.

Trump’s ability to change his position when things get rough has earned him the nickname TACO (Trump Always Chickens Out).

But his shambolic address to the nation on Wednesday demonstrated that he can’t TACO his way out of this one: Amid unconvincing boasts that the US is “winning bigger than ever before,” Trump offered no clear rationale for the war and no plan or strategy to end it or resolve the vast economic disruption created by Iran’s closure of the Strait of Hormuz. It didn’t work. The stock market dropped and the price of oil spiked as soon as he finished speaking.

The speech showed that Trump is stuck. He is constitutionally incapable of accepting that he made a mistake by attacking Iran with no plan for keeping 20% of the world’s oil — not to mention around 20% of the world’s fertiliser — moving through the strait, or to take action to rectify it. Instead, he now claims that it’s “somebody else’s problem” and, in his speech to the nation, called on European and Asian countries to “grab it and cherish it.”

Since this isn’t going to happen, the only other options are likely desperate. Trump could escalate and invade Iran with ground troops, which will make the energy crisis catastrophically worse. Or he could unilaterally deescalate, end the war and cede control of the strait to Iran, which would likely mean Iran operating a tolling system to exit the Persian Gulf, as it has already begun to do, and a continued reduction in oil flowing through.

“No matter how we exit this, we’re in a much worse scenario for the oil market than we were before,” oil analyst Rory Johnston said on his podcast “Oil Ground Up” on March 31.

This is politically toxic for any administration. But it is even worse for Trump personally, as his second term has been plagued by one unpopular initiative after another.

Trump’s Liberation Day tariffs, since ruled unconstitutional, caused instant market chaos. His mass deportation campaign of attacking US cities with paramilitary forces turned his most popular position into a net negative.

His bungling of the Epstein Files turned his own brand of conspiracism against him. His Big Beautiful Bill slashed health care spending, causing millions who get insurance through the Affordable Care Act to lose it due to huge price spikes.

That last point is key to his biggest problem: most of his major actions have caused price increases, in complete contradiction to his core campaign promise to lower domestic costs. His on-again, off-again tariffs led to widespread price increases on a range of goods while his immigration crackdown has led to increased costs in fields like in-home elder care and agriculture. Meanwhile, the full impact of the Iran war on prices, particularly for petrol, has not yet come close to being felt.

Trump and his economic advisers are already trying to claim that these price effects are merely temporary. During his Wednesday speech, Trump said that when the war ends, “gas prices will rapidly come back down.” National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett said on Friday that “energy prices are going down as this quiets down,” pointing to lower oil futures prices for autumn shipments.

But this is just the same happy-talk that Trump offered during the early stages of COVID about cases “going down” and promises that the virus would just “disappear.” If anything, oil prices are currently being traded based on “irrational optimism,” Johnston said on his podcast, adding that “futures markets are grievously underpricing.”

This is exactly the opposite of what voters who swung to Trump in 2024 wanted. The top issue in that election, particularly for swing voters, was the cost of living and inflation. That single issue helped Trump build a coalition that gave him a popular vote majority for the first time in three elections. But that victory made him think he had a mandate to do whatever he wanted, and he promptly went about ignoring voters’ main concern.

The response from voters is about what you’d expect. Working-class Black and Latino voters who swung to him in 2024 are now moving away from Trump and Republicans, according to a March 2026 study by the Center for Working-Class Politics. This flip showed up in recent elections like the 2025 New Jersey and Virginia governors’ races, where the Democratic candidates won big in heavily Latino areas that had swung to Trump just one year earlier.

Young people aged 18-34 moved towards Trump in 2024 and gave him positive approval numbers at the beginning of his term, but a recent CNN poll found 80% now disapprove. Similarly, 73% of independent voters now disapprove of Trump, according to that same CNN poll.

It is not surprising that Trump is growing more and more unpopular as he has somehow brought about all of the worst problems that vexed past presidents all by himself. He has created, on his own, Joe Biden’s inflation, Jimmy Carter’s energy shock (caused by a conflict in Iran, no less) and George W. Bush’s catastrophic war of choice in the Middle East.

With the downing of an American jet over Iran, he may also replicate the disaster Carter faced with an Iranian hostage crisis. And he has done it all by launching his own war of choice, after campaigning on a promise of no new wars. It is hard to imagine a worse series of political decisions.

With the midterm elections a scant seven months away, things look bleak for Republicans in November. Even if they lose only the House, that will effectively end congressional blessing for Trump’s authoritarian power grab — and, in all likelihood, condemn his final two years in office to investigation, impeachment and repudiation.

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In February, Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. shared a video of him eating steak, exercising shirtless and drinking whole milk in a hot tub with ’00s-era musician Kid Rock. The internet’s response to the video was largely bewilderment and mocking, but whether or not the pair succeeded in looking cool, they certainly telegraphed an attempt at masculinity.

The video draws a straight line between the person responsible for US food and health policy and the “manosphere,” as some call it — the side of the internet that largely consists of fitness videos aimed at young men but is also known for introducing its followers to misogynistic, homophobic and antisemitic ideas. So, it might be worth paying attention to what he — and other men in the public eye — wants to be seen eating.

Research shows that not only do men tend to eat more meat than women globally, but also that men are more reactive and defensive to messaging that suggests they lower their meat consumption, be it for personal health or ethical, animal welfare or climate-related reasons.

The beef-loving, vegetarian-hating dad guy is a pop culture trope at this point: Think Parks and Recreation’s Ron Swanson, or Homer Simpson, who famously said, “You don’t win friends with salad.” Cartman of South Park once said, “If you don’t eat meat at all, you become a pussy” (which, in the show’s context, turned out to be kind of literally true). In any case, you can bet that the manliest man dudes, whether aspirational or not, will be offended and maybe even downright hostile if presented with a meatless plate.

“If you go to women and say, ‘[Meat] is really bad, you should probably think about cutting down,’ women will tend to respond by cutting down,” said Sophie Attwood, a psychologist and behavioral scientist whose work focuses on food choice as it relates to human health and environmental sustainability. “Whereas, if you do that to men, what happens is they push back, go right into defence mechanisms — and then they increase intake.”

It’s a generalization, she qualifies, but one that she attests to seeing replicated consistently in the research. This led her to wonder: Why exactly are men so connected to meat?

Daniel Rosenfeld, a UCLA psychologist who studies eating behavior and morality, offers some theories.

“There isn’t 100% certainty on why the meat-masculinity association exists, but a good account is one of historical and evolutionary narrative. We have this image in our heads that as humans, Homo sapiens, we are traditionally hunter-gatherers, from pre-agricultural times, and that’s kind of the glorified era of what our instincts tell us to do, in a lot of people’s minds,” Rosenfeld explained. This provides some justification for seeing divergent gender roles as something natural and inherent, rather than socially imposed.

“Men fall into the ‘hunter’ category in our minds, and women the ‘gatherer’ category. And so that’s one explanation for why people view it as manly to eat meat, because meat comes from animals that we have to hunt,” Rosenfeld said. Eating an animal signifies dominance over nature (even though you probably bought it from a store rather than hunting and killing the animal yourself), and for many, masculinity and dominance are inseparable.

Conversely, “a salad or tofu or other plant-based foods can be viewed as having more feminine attributes because those are gathered and not hunted,” he said.

Rosenfeld uses the term “narrative” intentionally — it’s less about any actual anthropological fact than it is about our beliefs. Modern scientists generally agree that early humans ate majority plant-based diets, and the meat they did eat was often collected by scavenging rather than hunting. It’s a far cry from the 18.5 pounds of meat consumed by the average American every month, but the reality hasn’t stopped modern humans from trying to replicate our “fantasy image,” as Rosenfeld puts it, of humans (and human men especially) as big consumers of meat.

Consider the paleo diet, which includes meat and is quite literally meant to mimic hunter-gatherer diets. Or, at the more extreme end, the “carnivore diet,” whose proponents claim that, actually, early humans ate entirely or almost entirely meat and that modern humans ought to as well for optimal health (despite heaps of scientific evidence suggesting otherwise).

Another idea that Rosenfeld said may influence the meat-manliness connection “can be an association of meat and protein, and protein and muscle, and muscle and manhood.”

We can see both of those ideas coming into play in pop culture and public figures like the Liver King, a manosphere influencer who wanted his fans to believe that his muscular stature was purely a result of following an “ancestral lifestyle,” i.e., eating plenty of raw organ meat, before eventually being exposed for his use of steroids. In “American Canto,” her book about their personal relationship, journalist Olivia Nuzzi described RFK Jr., saying, “like all men, but more so, he was a hunter.” It’s an evocative description, but also a literal one: Kennedy is into falconry. It’s hardly a coincidence that the man currently leading American food and nutrition policy fits the mould of masculinity, especially in such a way that’s both flashy and traditional.

Regardless of where the association comes from, it still doesn’t completely explain why men can be so defensive of their meat-eating, even when it comes up against established science or their own values. We may get a hint, however, by zooming out.

A recent study out of Germany found that men of lower socioeconomic status tend to consume the most meat. Another study, from 2024, found that gender differences in meat consumption were the widest in the most gender-egalitarian countries (Scandinavian nations take the top spots, while the US and UK fall around the middle). It seems that when men are (or believe themselves to be) socially or economically disempowered, meat becomes more meaningful.

In the US today, it’s hardly a secret that men are falling behind women in categories like education, employment and even health. A generation or two ago, it was not only possible, but common, for a man to support a wife and kids on the income from a single, even blue-collar, job. Men today may still feel that being a “provider” is intrinsic to their identity, even as it becomes impossible for them to provide in the same way they saw their grandfathers doing. So if you’re not a provider, what are you? Are you really a man?

Attwood notes that diet is uniquely important in identity construction — not just for meat-eating men, but other kinds of people, like, say, environmentally conscious academics and vegan journalists. “If you’re under threat, your identity is under threat. So your whole thing is about trying to neutralise the threat and reassert the identity, which means you are going to hang on to these symbols to use to communicate to others,” she said.

Some aspects of masculine identity can be considered neutral or even positive, like the desire to provide for others materially. But traits like dominance are inherently hostile, falling into that bucket we call “toxic masculinity.” And these ideas are so culturally embedded that we see them playing out in pop culture and even in policy.

With the release of the latest USDA food pyramid, which features a cartoon T-bone in its illustration of nutritious foods, RFK Jr. announced the end of the nation’s “war on protein,” waged by liberal food policy and “big villains” like the American Heart Association. Never mind that most Americans are already eating too much protein, or that in the last decade, food companies have quadrupled the amount of high-protein products on the market. Never mind that virtually every major health authority agrees that red meat and full-fat dairy are associated with poor health outcomes, especially regarding the very same chronic illnesses our health administration claims to be targeting. And definitely never mind that the very same federal agency just last October announced a battery of plans to “strengthen the American beef industry,” suggesting an entirely different motivation for pushing meat-eating on the general population.

Because what matters here isn’t scientific fact, it’s the story being told. Meat eating is good and natural, and anyone who tells you otherwise is a “villain” to be defeated. Making America Healthy Again means embracing tradition and rejecting any nutritional science that challenges it. Making America Great Again means taking our rightful place as the world’s most powerful nation, able to dominate all the rest. And if anyone suggests you swap in plant-based protein every so often? What they’re really telling you is to stop being a man.

Or so the story goes, anyway.

There are many important factors to consider when thinking about healthy ageing, not the least of which is fall risk.

One in four adults over 65 falls each year, according to Centers for Disease Control data from the US, and many of those people require hospitalisation, medical attention or lifestyle changes due to injury.

“One of the biggest issues that we worry about as geriatricians in older adults is falls because they can cause a lot of injuries,” said Dr. Maureen Dale, an associate professor of geriatric medicine at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Medicine.

Falls can cause hip fractures, vertebral fractures or worse, all of which can hugely impact day-to-day life for older adults, she added. “And so preventing falls is really important in our patients as we age, and one of the best ways to prevent falls is to make sure people have good balance.”

This is particularly important for post-menopausal women who may have low bone density, said Dr. James F. Wyss, a spine and sports medicine physiatrist at the Hospital for Special Surgery in New York.

“Lots of times, the focus on preventing a fracture is addressing bone density and strength training. But the greatest way to prevent a fracture is to prevent a fall,” Wyss said. “Sure, it’s great if you can get your bones stronger through strength training or a medication, but if you don’t fall, you’ve eliminated the risk altogether.”

Being able to balance for a few seconds is fine, but research shows that adults should be able to balance for longer. Here’s what to know.

“People should be able to stand on one foot for about 10 seconds and be able to hold their balance,” Dale said. “If they can’t do that, that’s worth talking to their primary care provider or physician about to think about things that they can do.”

There are often medical interventions that can improve balance, she noted.

While 10 seconds is the goal, the longer you can balance – even up to 30 seconds – the better, noted Janice McGrail, a physical therapist at Mass General Brigham’s Spaulding Rehabilitation.

Research shows that if you can’t balance for 10 seconds, you’re at a higher risk of falls, according to Wyss. And if you can’t hold your balance for five seconds, you are at an even higher fall risk.

Being unable to stay steady on one leg can also be a sign of other medical issues.

“Sometimes it’s just that people have a little bit of weakness in their leg muscles and need to work on an exercise program or a physical therapy program that focuses on strengthening those leg and core muscles that help support our balance,” Dale said.

Stability issues may be caused by medications, Dale noted. Certain vitamin deficiencies can also be the culprit, Dale added, such as a vitamin B12 deficiency.

“And then sometimes we find that people have sensory changes, so decreased sensation in their feet and legs that can impact their balance as well,” Dale noted.

Your doctor can help determine the cause of your balance issues and work with you toward a solution.

“There are a lot of things that we can do to help support and promote healthy balance in people. So that’s why the starting point really is talking to your primary care provider,” Dale explained.

It’s simple to start working on your balance – as long as your doctor says it’s safe to do so.

You can begin by building balance work into daily habits such as standing on one foot as you brush your teeth or as you wait for your lunch to heat up in the microwave, according to McGrail.

Depending on how steady you feel, you can also try standing with one foot in front of the other like you’re walking on balance beams.

It’s important to practice this safely so you don’t end up falling, McGrail said.

“When I’m giving someone an exercise to do at home for balance, I always tell them to stand at the kitchen counter [if you’re microwaving food] or at the sink counter if you’re brushing your teeth … so that you have something in front of you that you can hold on to if you need to,” McGrail said, adding that you should also put a chair behind you so that if you fall backwards, you “can just sit in the chair rather than ending up on the floor.”

If you aren’t ready to try standing on one foot, you can practice balancing by walking on your toes or heels throughout your house, Wyss said.

Folks who can easily balance on one leg while brushing their teeth or microwaving food can take it one step further and incorporate balance into their workout regimen, such as doing bicep curls while balancing on one foot, Wyss suggested.

“It’s 40s, 50s that I start tell people, ‘All right, start incorporating a little more balance training into your routine,’” Wyss explained.

Regular exercise three times a week is also a good way to improve and maintain your balance, according to Dale. Additionally, programs like tai chi, yoga and a physical therapy program known as Otago have been shown to also improve stability.

It’s never too late to work on your balance, McGrail stressed. As long as you’re up and moving, you can make small steps to improve it.

If you need support from a doctor or physical therapist, reach out and they can help prescribe you a safe balance-building program. Even if you’re not yet at an age where you worry much about balance, it’s still important to see your doctor regularly and manage any chronic medical issues that could contribute to balance issues down the road, Dale said.

“Making sure that we’re managing diabetes and heart disease and vascular disease are important things to keep us healthy now and to keep us healthy and well-balanced later,” Dale said.

Additional comment from Dr Shelley Galpin, a lecturer in Media, Culture, and Creative Industries at King’s College London.

Adapting a book for a TV show or movie means some readers are sure to be disappointed (take, for instance, Emerald Fennell’s controversial Wuthering Heights).

The BBC’s The Other Bennet Sister is no exception. Focused on Mary, the largely forgotten sibling in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, the series takes significant enough liberties with the author’s original work for some readers to dub it “fanfic”.

Personally, I’ve never seen that as much of an insult (what are Clueless or Bridget Jones if not very well-done Austen fan fictions?).

If anything, though it has its flaws, I think The Other Bennet Sister is a fun, highly watchable series that fits as neatly into the book’s premise as a mid-2020s TV show can.

It’s not the best screenwriting, I grant you. But the 1940 Pride and Prejudice film adaptation, which included the lines “At this moment, it’s difficult to believe that you’re so proud.” “At this moment, it’s difficult to believe that you are so prejudiced”, made a (clunky) point.

The book is all about how we see and unfairly judge one another, including as a reader. And speaking to HuffPost UK, media, culture, and creative industries lecturer Dr Shelley Galpin said, “The [BBC] series works well as a development of those ideas”.

Of course, Lizzie misunderstands Mr Darcy and Wickham in turns, and Mr Darcy is unkindly snobbish about the Bennets.

But we know that because Austen explicitly paints the picture for us. Her real art is in making us question the characters the book itself portrays negatively: if Mrs Bennet is so irrational and silly, how come the far better-off Mr Bennet married her – and why do some of her schemes, like sending a rain-sodden Jane off to sneeze over the nearest herd of poshies, kind of work out?

Why didn’t Lizzie, or most readers, trust Charlotte Lucas when she (rightly) said Mr Collins was perfect for many of her needs?

Not to pummel the remains of a long-dead horse further into the ground here, but the book makes us ask: were we proud, or prejudiced, when we read it?

I was pleased to see that the Richared E. Grant Mr Bennet’s head-in-the-sand approach to raising children is a lot more explicit than in, say, the 2005 film (even if Mrs Bennet, played by Ruth Jones, is more flatly harsh – both Dr Galpin and I felt the speech she gives at the end of the show was not quite enough to redeem her being “such a nightmare” the rest of the time).

Other characters were reframed, too.

“I definitely felt that some of the more irritating or comic character elements were softened a little [in The Other Bennet Sister] – Mary and Mr Collins were both a little less ‘preachy’ and lacking in social awareness than in their original iterations, so I felt that some artistic license was taken with the characterisation, but this is perhaps consistent with the show centring on Mary’s view of the world more,” said Dr Galpin.

“I… liked the slight rehabilitation of Mr Collins, who is, at the end of the day, trying to do the right thing, even if he is far from the ideal romantic hero.”

Mary, whom I always saw as quite similar to the shy, bookish, devout Fanny Price protagonist in Mansfield Park, was well overdue for a similar reinterpetation, though Dr Galpin pointed out that her TV self might be closer to the original novel than I realised.

“It struck me as I watched it that Mary is essentially playing the ‘Lizzie’ role from P&P. In Austen’s novel, Lizzie is supposed to be a little awkward and lacking in social niceties (in comparison to perfect Jane!) and less attractive than her sister.

“She also continually irritates her mother by making supposedly imprudent marriage choices. Mary essentially steps into this persona in the series. The rivalry with Caroline Bingley also echoes Lizzie’s role in the original novel,” she said.

So, when the BBC show depicts Mary as strong-willed, ambitious, self-aware, and bloomingly confident once she reaches London, it’s not a correction of Jane Austen’s book but a natural extension of it.

It makes as much sense as a spin-off TV series as Mr Collins’ (relatively) successful marriage, or Caroline Bingley’s genuinely well-meaning Wickham warning, do in the novel; not what we were led to expect initially, but hey, what sucker doesn’t question their first impression?

That’s Austen, baby – and in my opinion, the witty, touching, and fun BBC adaptation has bottled it perfectly.