The new Netflix movie version of Persuasion, Jane Austen’s finest novel — the last one completed before her death at age forty-one  — is so stupid it’s become the occasion for many scalding reviews. One of the most-quoted is entitled “Everyone involved should be in prison: Netflix’s Persuasion reviewed.”

This version of Persuasion is the sadly inevitable end point of many years of Andrew Davies–ing Jane Austen adaptions. Davies, who wrote the justly revered six-episode BBC version of Pride and Prejudice (1995), initially seemed like just what the doctor ordered. He’d cracked the code when it came to bringing out the excitement in apparently decorous Austen narratives: lively outdoor scenes (horses galloping, carriages racing), boudoir interludes with characters in a state of semi-undress — and most important, the famous scene of Colin Firth as Mr Darcy throwing himself into a pond in a state of maddened longing for Elizabeth Bennet (Jennifer Ehle) and emerging with tousled, dripping hair and one of those blousy white period shirts plastered to his body. Decades later, wet young Firth lives on in millions of feverish imaginations.

In short, Davies invented Hot Austen Adaptations.