Lydia Bennet might not be the most beloved character in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, but she is absolutely pivotal to the plot. If not for Lydia running off with Wickham, Darcy would not be forced to unbend from his principles to save her, setting in motion the chain of events that leads Elizabeth Bennet to reassess her first impressions and eventually become Mrs. Darcy. But how do you translate Lydia’s elopement for an early twenty-first-century American setting?

For me, that quest began in late 2011. I was a young freelance television writer with two produced episodes on my resume, along with a multiyear run as a writers’ assistant on several series, all of which had been cancelled before I could be promoted to the writing staff. I had just been laid off after the cancellation of series number four when Bernie Su reached out and suggested we meet at a Los Feliz coffee shop so he could tell me about his latest project. I knew Bernie casually at the time. I was aware he had written and directed several web series that had gotten some attention, and that he was always taking pictures when I saw him at writers’ events. The new project he wanted to talk to me about was a collaboration with a guy named Hank from Montana to create vlog-style adaptations of public-domain novels for a young, female audience.

“Oh,” I said, “So you’re going to do something like Pride and Prejudice on YouTube.”

Bernie paused. “Actually, we’re going to do exactly Pride and Prejudice on YouTube. Do you want to write for it?”

I hadn’t read Pride and Prejudice since college, but I remembered it fondly, and I had watched and enjoyed the BBC miniseries and the 2005 film versions. The project sounded interesting, and I had just been laid off. Crucially, someone was offering me a job that wasn’t an over-qualified writers’ assistant on yet another soon-to-be-cancelled television show.

Did I want to write for Pride and Prejudice on YouTube?

To paraphrase an English novelist who is not Jane Austen: Reader, I did.

Bernie paused. “Actually, we’re going to do exactly Pride and Prejudice on

YouTube. Do you want to write for it?”