10 Best 1990s BBC Period Dramas (That Aren't Pride & Prejudice)

Added: 2026-05-23

[00:00:02]House of Eliot?

[00:00:05]A family so noted for the prudence of its women.

[00:00:14]A decade before Sean Bean was Boromir, the BBC cast him as an 18th century and somehow he was so magnetic in the role that audiences kept falling for him anyway, even knowing exactly what he was going to do.

[00:00:28]The novel this is based on is insane.

[00:00:31]Samuel Richardson published it in 1748 and it's told entirely through letters, nearly a million words across seven volumes.

[00:00:40]The English writer Samuel Johnson famously said that if you read Clarissa for the plot, you'd hang yourself. F.

[00:00:46]Scott Fitzgerald thought it was a masterpiece. The BBC adaptation in 1991 was the first time anyone had really tried to bring it to television.

[00:00:56]The story is about a young woman named Clarissa Harlowe who inherits most of her grandfather's estate, which immediately makes her family furious.

[00:01:05]They want that money, so they start trying to force her into marrying some repulsive rich guy.

[00:01:10]Meanwhile, a handsome rake named Robert Lovelace sees Clarissa and becomes completely fixated on her. Clarissa thinks Lovelace might be her escape from the family's scheming. She runs off with him. Turns out it's the worst decision of her life.

[00:01:25]I'm not going to spoil where it goes, but I will say this is one of the darkest stories Masterpiece Theatre ever aired. Check the trigger warnings before you watch.

[00:01:34]But Sean Bean is just brilliant here. He plays Lovelace as this creature who's repellent and irresistible at the same time. You know exactly what he is. You know what's coming and some part of you is still drawn to him.

[00:01:51]David Lean spent years trying to make this film. The director of Lawrence of Arabia working with Steven Spielberg as producer, developing an adaptation of Joseph Conrad's Nostromo as what would have been his final masterpiece.

[00:02:05]Then Lean died in 1991, never shot a frame. Six years later, the BBC made it as a television series instead.

[00:02:14]The story is set in a fictional South American country being torn apart by revolution and foreign money and silver mining. Colin Firth plays an idealistic English aristocrat who reopens an abandoned mine, pours everything he has into it, and watches the country devour his wealth and his principles. When revolution breaks out, he entrusts a shipment of silver to the harbor foreman, a man named Nostromo whose whole identity is built on being incorruptible. The silver destroys him anyway.

[00:02:44]F. Scott Fitzgerald said he'd rather have written Nostromo than any other novel. Conrad isn't easy to adapt. The narrative is dense, and the BBC version can be hard to follow in places, but the cinematography is beautiful, and the performances from Firth and Albert Finney are worth the 6 hours.

[00:03:03]It's hard to find now, but someone's uploaded it to YouTube. Worth watching if only to imagine what Lean might have done with it.

[00:03:14]This was created by Jean Marsh and Eileen Atkins, the same pair who made Upstairs, Downstairs. In the early '90s, it was one of the BBC's biggest dramas, pulling over 10 million viewers regularly.

[00:03:26]Two sisters, Beatrice and Evie Elliot, are left with nothing when their tyrannical father dies in 1920.

[00:03:33]No inheritance, no education, no professional training. Their cousin controls the estate and keeps the money for their own good. All they have is a talent for making clothes. So, they start a dressmaking business in a back room, and over three series, they build it into a fashion house serving the London aristocracy.

[00:03:52]The costumes in the show are genuinely extraordinary. The designer, Joan Wadge, won both a BAFTA and an Emmy for the first series. Her work was exhibited at the Victoria and Albert Museum. There's a coat that Beatrice wears in one episode that survived into other productions. You can spot it in several 1920s period dramas, including Downton Abbey years later.

[00:04:14]And then it all burned.

[00:04:17]During the hiatus after series 3, fire broke out in costume storage and destroyed 90% of those Emmy-winning costumes. The BBC looked at what it would cost to recreate them and decided to cancel the show instead.

[00:04:32]The writers hadn't been told series 3 was the last. The storyline just stops mid-arc. The House of Elliot is in financial ruin. The sisters have been offered an American tour, and that's where it ends. They were clearly building toward a fourth series. It never happened.

[00:04:52]Max Beesley was a session drummer. He'd played with Robbie Williams, done the professional musician thing, and then somehow ended up cast in his first major acting role opposite a 20-year-old Samantha Morton, who was 2 years away from her first Oscar nomination. That pairing is the heart of The History of Tom Jones.

[00:05:12]The story is based on Henry Fielding's 1749 novel, which nobody had adapted since Tony Richardson won an Oscar for the Albert Finney version back in 1963.

[00:05:23]Tom Jones [music] is a foundling, a baby of unknown parentage raised by a kind squire. He grows into this generous, good-hearted young man who also happens to be completely sexually uninhibited.

[00:05:34]He falls in love with the girl next door, but scheming rivals get him thrown out of the house, and he ends up wandering toward London, getting into trouble and into beds.

[00:05:44]All the while, the woman he loves chases after him across England.

[00:05:49]It's one of the finest things television has given us, and it's a shame almost nobody talks about it. Beesley went on to have a solid acting career, Morton got her Oscar nominations, and this adaptation just kind of disappeared into the BBC archive.

[00:06:08]When Dickens published Martin Chuzzlewit in monthly installments starting in 1843, it flopped. Sales were disappointing enough that he started worrying about money. So, while he was still writing Chuzzlewit, Dickens knocked out a quick side project to bring in some cash. That side project was A Christmas Carol.

[00:06:28]A Christmas Carol became immortal.

[00:06:30]Martin Chuzzlewit became Dickens's least known major novel. It's a sprawling story about a wealthy, bitter old man surrounded by relatives scheming to get his money.

[00:06:40]The villain driving everything is Seth Pecksniff, a sanctimonious architect who flatters his way into the old man's house and secretly plots to steal the inheritance.

[00:06:51]In 1994, the BBC adapted it with Paul Scofield, Tom Wilkinson, Keith Allen, Emma Chambers, and John Mills. They brought in David Lodge to write it, not a television writer, but one of the major English novelists and literary critics of the 20th century.

[00:07:06]The thing has an 8.1 on IMDb, higher than Dickens adaptations 10 times more famous.

[00:07:13]The performance to watch is Tom Wilkinson as Pecksniff. This was years before The Full Monty and before Michael Clayton. Wilkinson was a working actor, not a name anyone knew, and he's incredible. He makes this pompous, greedy, hypocritical villain completely watchable. You can't take your eyes off him even when he's being repulsive.

[00:07:38]By the late '90s, Andrew Davies was the BBC's period drama fixer. Middlemarch in 1994, Pride and Prejudice in 1995, Moll Flanders in 1996.

[00:07:49]The guy was pulling over 200,000 pounds per six-part serial. When the BBC wanted another shot at Vanity Fair, Davies was the only call to make.

[00:07:59]He cast an unknown name, Natasha Little, as Becky Sharp. Becky is a penniless orphan who leaves finishing school at 19 with one goal: claw her way into London high society using charm, intelligence, manipulation, or sex, whatever it takes.

[00:08:14]The series follows her across 20 years through the Napoleonic Wars as she marries a broke officer with a rich aunt, schemes her way into aristocratic circles, catches the eye of a predatory marquis, and eventually loses everything.

[00:08:30]The role needs someone who can make you root for a person doing genuinely terrible things. That's almost impossible to pull off. Natasha Little pulls it off.

[00:08:40]25 years later, people on Letterboxd still call her the definitive Becky Sharp, the standard everyone else gets measured against.

[00:08:51]After Pride and Prejudice blew up, the BBC wanted to do it again. Same magic, same audience, same cultural moment. So, they went to the Brontës. But not Charlotte or Emily. They picked Anne, the one nobody ever talks about.

[00:09:06]And Anne's novel was not what anyone expected. It's about a woman who shows up at Wildfell Hall with her son, tells everyone she's a widow and refuses to talk about her past. Turns out she's not a widow at all. She left her husband, walked out on him because he was an alcoholic and an abuser, took her kid, and decided to support herself by selling her paintings.

[00:09:29]Anne wrote that in 1848.

[00:09:31]It was so far ahead of its time, TV didn't start telling stories like that until the 1990s. And the book has only been adapted twice in its entire history. This is one of those, too.

[00:09:42]You've got Rupert Graves playing the abusive husband, charming and terrifying. Toby Stephens is the farmer who falls for Helen, bringing this ridiculous charisma to every scene he's in. The ending feels a bit rushed, but that's nitpicking. The whole thing is worth your time.

[00:10:01]This one won four BAFTAs, including Best Drama Serial. And when you see the cast they assembled, you understand why. This might be the most stacked lineup of any BBC period drama from the 90s.

[00:10:14]They adapted Dickens' last completed novel, which is also his darkest and most tangled. The plot goes like this. A rich man dies, his heir gets murdered before he can inherit, and the money ends up going to the dead man's servants instead.

[00:10:29]Except the heir isn't actually dead. He faked his own murder. He comes back under a different name, gets himself hired by the servants who inherited his money, and watches the woman he was supposed to marry. He's trying to figure out if she'd love him without the fortune attached.

[00:10:47]Sandy Welch wrote the adaptation. If you know that name, it's probably from North and South, which she wrote a few years later and which is one of the best things the BBC has ever produced. For Our Mutual Friend, she had to take a novel that Dickens originally published in 20 parts and turn it into 6 hours of television. Dickens didn't exactly write tight plots. The man got paid by the word, and it showed. So, making that work was a serious achievement. What they ended up with is one of the best Dickens adaptations ever made.

[00:11:23]After Pride and Prejudice turned into this phenomenon, the BBC went to Andrew Davies and Sue Birtwistle, and basically said, "Pick anything. Whatever book you want, we'll make it. They could have played it safe, gone for another guaranteed hit. Instead, they picked Elizabeth Gaskell's final novel, the one she died before she could finish.

[00:11:44]Gaskell had a heart attack in November 1865.

[00:11:47]The book was almost done, but not quite.

[00:11:50]She told a friend how she planned to end it, so there was something to work from, but Davies still had to actually write the ending himself. He said it was an interesting challenge. Gaskell was clearly building towards something happy, so he just had to figure out how to land the plane.

[00:12:06]The story follows Molly, a doctor's daughter in a small English town, whose life gets upended when her father remarries. The new stepmother brings her daughter Cynthia into the house. Cynthia is everything Molly isn't, beautiful, reckless, and hiding secret affairs.

[00:12:21]Molly falls for a guy named Roger, but he proposes to Cynthia instead.

[00:12:26]Davies pulled off the happy ending. The whole thing works beautifully. Some people think it's even better than Pride and Prejudice.

[00:12:37]This is where it all started. Every BBC period drama you've ever loved exists because this one worked.

[00:12:44]For years, the BBC had been turning down costume dramas. The official position was that nobody cared about that stuff anymore. Then Michael Wearing, the head of drama, decided to take a shot. He put 6 million pounds into a six-part adaptation of George Eliot's Middlemarch, which a lot of people consider the greatest novel in the English language. 6 million was the most expensive drama the BBC had ever produced. If it flopped, his career was probably over.

[00:13:13]It didn't flop.

[00:13:14]The show became a national event. It put the Middlemarch paperback on the bestseller list for 5 weeks straight.

[00:13:20]And when Andrew Davies proved he could handle material like this, the BBC gave him Pride and Prejudice next.

[00:13:28]The story itself follows a bunch of intersecting lives in a small town during the 1830s. The main thread is Dorothea, this young idealist who makes a terrible marriage to an old scholar, then falls for his cousin. That cousin is played by Rufus Sewell, who was 27 at the time and completely unknown. After Middlemarch aired, he was a star overnight.

[00:13:49]Middlemarch didn't become the cultural moment that Pride and Prejudice did. It never got that level of fame, but without it, none of the others would exist. It proved the audience was there.