The Lizzie Bennet Diaries has been voted the BEST webseries ever by Hypable readers. To celebrate, Hypable speaks to stars Ashley Clements and Daniel Vincent Gordh.
We asked you to nominate, we asked you vote, and now we are happy to announce the winner of our Webseries Wednesday poll.
The winner is: ‘The Lizzie Bennet Diaries’!
16,863 votes were cast by Hypable readers, and The Lizzie Bennet Diaries managed to take out an astonishing 30% with 4,984 votes. Marble Hornets took out second place, and Husbands came in third. Thank you to everyone who took the time to support their favourite webseries!
The Lizzie Bennet Diaries is a beautiful modern interpretation of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. The 100-episode webseries translates the memorable characters into the current day, with a few changes on the way. But this is a story that has benefited from the changes, which allowed the storytellers to expand the world in all kinds of directions.
We saw the increased presence of often ignored characters, such as Lydia Bennet and Gigi Darcy. The creative team allowed us to enter Lizzie’s world, through the various transmedia elements such as Twitter, Facebook and Tumblr accounts, YouTube spin-offs, Q&A videos, and more. These elements allowed the audience to experience the story of Pride and Prejudice in a way never achieved before. The audience didn’t merely witness Lizzie’s story, they could actually experience it alongside her.
It was sad to see the story end, but of course in the world of web it is never really over. The episodes and transmedia accounts may not be updated anymore, but they still exist, ready for new fans to discover. In some ways, Lizzie and her friends live on in perpetuity, living their lives just around the corner from us and only just out of reach. But that’s okay, because when we miss them we can simply go back to the story, and fall right back into it again.
Webseries Wednesday interview:
Ashley Clements and Daniel Vincent Gordh
Hypable spoke to Lizzie Bennet Diaries stars Ashley Clements and Daniel Vincent Gordh, who sizzled together onscreen as Lizzie and Darcy. The pair spoke to us about their feelings of closure, their favourite moments working on the adaptation, and more. How do they view the series in hindsight?
Several months following the finale, do you feel a sense of closure about the series?
Ashley Clements: In some ways, yes. I feel closure as an actor, that my time playing Lizzie is over. I’ve adjusted to Mondays and Thursdays being like any other day. But in many ways, the show lives on. I’m still doing panels and interviews (like this one) about the show. I see cast/crew from The LBD socially quite frequently, and we’ll all be together at LeakyCon next month.
There’s still a lot of work to be done to make the DVD, and I still hear from people daily on twitter and tumblr that have just discovered The LBD. The show lives on with the fans, and will continue to do so, and that’s a pretty remarkable thing. I do think about Lizzie sometimes, though. She should be graduating from grad school around now, and then moving to San Francisco, soon. She has a lot of life ahead of her.
Daniel Vincent Gordh: You know it’s interesting – I do and I don’t. I feel very satisfied with how the show wrapped up – how the story ended and where our characters were left. And in that sense I feel closure. But I don’t feel the same sense of closure that one talks about after ending a relationship – where loose ends are finally tied, wounds mended, lessons learned. Partially because I don’t seek that kind of closure.
The story isn’t finished being told – both the story of what the show will mean in the scheme of the development of new media projects in the future, but also people are still discovering it now. That’s one great thing about having a show that is free for viewing on the internet. People will be discovering the show for a while, and experiencing the story for the first time.
Though the narrative piece of the show is technically over – the ripples created from it are still being felt – I really feel there’s more to the larger story of The Lizzie Bennet Diaries that is yet to be revealed.
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