Rotten Tomatoes lied to me again. The cast of the Australian Pride and Prejudice was made up of someone who looked like Zoey Deutch but wasn’t Zoey Deutch, someone who looked like Jesse Plemons but wasn’t Jesse Plemons, and someone who looked like Bette Midler but was definitely not Bette Midler.
The story basically revolved around that supposedly wild, fake Zoey Deutch and her wish to become a writer in 19th-century Australian society. She goes from a farm girl to a family relative’s posh house to find a husband, and that’s when the screenwriters decide to show us how wild she is: she erotically caresses books in a library, pees in the middle of an alleyway, and sometimes takes a swim in a lake with her garments on. That’s when she isn’t riding horses using a stick hobbyhorse or reading suggestive poetry out loud in front of people. You can tell how easily entertained 19th-century people were.
And just like in any Pride and Prejudice storyline, all the dudes who meet her want to marry her. But for selfish reasons. So she almost says yes to some of them, and surprise, surprise, when she does say no, they’re pissed and drag her name in the dirt.
So she pees in the middle of an alleyway again and convinces another girl, who, by the way, is a rich princess but isn’t sober at that moment, to do the same. The rich princess then decides to break off her own engagement with a dude. A Chinese dude. Such a bad influence that fake Zoey Deutch.
But also, she writes! Yes! The series creators want to make us believe how good a writer she is, so they make her recite verses while peeing in the middle of alleyways. Then she reveals the story she’s been writing all along, which is a plagiarized Robin Hood. Her fake Bette Midler aunt eats weed loukoums, then sends the fake Zoey Deutch’s plagiarized Robin Hood tale to the local newspaper, which rejects her story. And fake Zoey Deutch acts very surprised.
She talks about how unfair it is to her new racialized best friend, who works at the stables and has to break in a thoroughbred horse, although the horse clearly looks like a cow. Yeah, because there is a whole storyline with the racialized best friend too, involving her running away with a gypsy who doesn’t shave and her sister getting pregnant by a cop who looks like Pee-Wee Herman.
As if we cared about the help’s uneventful pity-party lives.
Come on, just show us the rich people eating cakes and oysters already. Like the fake Zoey Deutch’s uncle, the fake Jesse Plemons, who wants to get laid with another gay dude. That was almost exciting. But then the other gay dude asks the fake Zoey Deutch to marry him, she says no, and he is pissed and drags her name in the dirt.
So the fake Zoey Deutch has no choice but to pee in the middle of an alleyway again.
But that’s not even the best part. The best part is that the fake Zoey Deutch ends up falling in love with the Chinese dude from before, the one who was almost engaged to the rich princess who peed with fake Zoey Deutch in the middle of an alleyway, and who justifies his Chineseness to us by saying that he was “adopted” and is “from a long line of landowners.”
The Chinese dude has a great muscly torso, with protruding ears that make him look like Dumbo. But because we are woke and we all love a good orphaned flying-elephant story, we decide to brush aside these historical inconsistencies and see where fake Zoey Deutch and Chinese protruding ears might go from there.
The answer is: nowhere.
Chinese protruding ears loses all of his fortunes giving away the many farms he acquires to random folks for free while still paying the mortgages, so he ends up working as a sheep herder during seasonal migration, and the makeup team on set apparently decides to stop grooming him, making him look even more like Dumbo, because his face progressively turns light gray.
Then the fake Zoey Deutch and Chinese protruding ears reunite. He asks her to marry him, she says no, writes a book, and takes a train in a spring-green dress; hopefully the train has toilets on board.
That was the plot of a $17-million show, which is the largest single season of television ever produced in South Australia.
My mind can’t help but go wild imagining what they could produce in North Australia.