‘My Brilliant Career’ Netflix Review: An Australian Feminist Classic Gets a Glossy, Generic Makeover

Everything eventually gets its chance to become the next Bridgerton — or some similar streaming series in which a period story is modernized in an effort to make it feel contemporary, fresh and multicultural. It’s an understandable exercise when viewed through the laws of the market, but a fairly irritating one by almost any other measure. And this isn’t necessarily because classic texts have to be respected religiously, far from it. It’s simply that there are more interesting things to do with them than pop-ify them until they become a glossy, cool and entertaining version of a soap opera.

Despite those unfortunate market-driven influences, the creators of the new version of My Brilliant Career have managed to make the best possible product under the circumstances. The series is based on the 1901 novel by the then very young Australian writer Miles Franklin, telling the story of a woman who dreams of being free, independent and making a living as a writer in a traditional society whose only plan for her is to find a husband. The novel — which became a canonical Australian text and is still taught in secondary schools there — was previously adapted into an acclaimed 1979 film directed by Gillian Armstrong and starring Judy Davis and the recently deceased Sam Neill. Now it gets the Netflix treatment.

The “updating” happens on several levels. There is, first, a soundtrack that makes no attempt to stick to the period, featuring songs by Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Wet Leg and The Last Dinner Party, among others. But those temporal fractures also make their way into the story itself: at a social event in 1900, for instance, someone performs a version of a Rod Stewart song. This isn’t necessarily a problem; cinema has been doing this for decades whenever filmmakers attempt postmodern reinterpretations of classics. Then there are characters of different ethnic backgrounds, a degree of sexual diversity absent from the novel, and specific characteristics given to the protagonist that make her resemble an empowered young woman from Brooklyn circa 2025.

Again, none of this is inherently wrong. The problem isn’t so much the accumulation of contemporary gestures as the obvious, unsubtle way they are deployed, with everything seemingly designed to turn My Brilliant Career into a light melodrama closer to a soap opera than to any particularly intelligent reinterpretation of the original text.

Still, if you accept that this is where the series is headed — something that becomes perfectly clear within about two minutes — My Brilliant Career at least has a funny and likable heroine, a remarkable actress playing her, and a supporting cast of characters who, as much as possible, do justice to the original story.

Played by Phillipa Northeast — an actress who looks like Rose Byrne’s younger sister or daughter — Sybylla Melvyn is an unconventional young woman growing up with her family in poverty on a farm, with an alcoholic father and a mother increasingly worried about their financial situation. Sybylla dreams of becoming a writer and her family decides to send her to Caddagat, the estate belonging to her grandmother, Mrs. Bossier (Anna Chancellor), a stern woman whose sole objective is to marry her granddaughter off to the best possible match. Sybylla, naturally, rebels, and the series follows the battle between social expectations and personal desires.

Over the course of its six episodes, Sybylla proves largely unmanageable for both her grandmother and Australian high society. Yet even within that world she finds a few apparent allies, including her politically minded aunt Helen (Genevieve O’Reilly), family friend and neighbor Augusta Beecham (Kate Mulvany), and several men who become interested in her but eventually realize — or are forcibly made to realize — that she is not the kind of “lady” they should marry.

Among them are the estate’s British overseer, Frank Hawdon (Jake Dunn), and Augusta’s nephew Harry Beecham (Christopher Chung, playing a character very different from the acidic figure he portrays in Slow Horses). Harry’s situation is particularly torturous: he falls in love with Sybylla while feeling increasingly pressured not to consider her seriously as a potential wife.

The series follows Sybylla as she reads — both her grandmother and Augusta have enormous libraries — and writes, making the most of the experience while, predictably, getting herself into trouble because of her refreshingly unbuttoned personality. Thanks to the character’s optimistic, energetic attitude and Northeast’s performance, the series is lively and charming. But before long, the formula driving the whole enterprise gets in the way, steering it toward increasingly predictable territory.

And that’s when Sybylla stops being a more or less credible character within her historical context and becomes a contemporary idea of the empowered woman dropped into an alien setting. While both Franklin’s novel and Armstrong’s adaptation are regarded as feminist works, everything here becomes too obvious, too heavily underlined and, ultimately, somewhat banal.

It’s a shame the series seems so preoccupied with checking those particular boxes, because Northeast is a genuinely interesting actress who occasionally seems capable of carrying the entire project on her own. But she can’t. The series keeps insisting on being “current” and addressing relevant issues — there’s a gay subplot, another involving Indigenous Australians, another connected to Harry’s Chinese heritage, and so on — to the point where it occasionally flirts with self-parody. Fortunately, it never quite gets there. The original text is noble enough to prevent the series from sinking that far. But the formula remains, heavy-handed and persistent, flattening almost everything in its path.

Despite the sympathy Sybylla generates, and even the connection one may feel with her free-spirited, uninhibited way of living in a stuffy and conservative society, the series never fully manages to make the most of either the character or her story. It is simply too concerned with being accessible to an audience accustomed to the Young Adult novels and dramas produced by streaming platforms. And once it gets there, it becomes very difficult to pull it back out.