I choose me. What a bold decision. Never before done by anyone in any film or television series, limited or otherwise. But those big, beautiful words, that power, and so many strong female leads, along with a few strong male leads, are becoming awfully redundant and more than a little derivative. Of course, it’s hard to call Netflix’s My Brilliant Career derivative when it’s adapted from a 1901 novel by Miles Franklin. A lot of the characters who have followed Sybylla Melvyn and had their own self-awakenings may, in fact, have knocked off this novel to begin with. It’s not quite on the level of classic literature like A Christmas Carol or Little Women, at least from my American perspective, but perhaps Franklin and My Brilliant Career are far more revered in Australia, where audiences would be more familiar with the author and the book.

That brings us to the clumsily pieced-together story of Sybylla Melvyn, played by Philippa Northeast, a young woman born into poverty who is given a chance at a wealthier existence through some grooming from her grandmother, Mrs. Bossier (Anna Chancellor). Sybylla is a strong, independent woman who doesn’t need a man, yet will find one anyway. Because, in the deepest of ironies, most of these women find a man whether they want to or not. Very few stories about a woman who has given up on love, marriage, family, and children actually avoid the concept altogether. So Sybylla, across this six-episode limited series, has a lot to tackle, including abject poverty, class structure, education, the place of a woman in society and the workplace, and the standards of courtship, ranging from men who see her as a feral, unkempt troublemaker to men who see her as a unicorn among horses.

The series starts by establishing that Sybylla is the oldest in the family and perhaps the most ready for the real world. She is educated, interested in becoming an author herself, and as well-read as someone in her predicament can possibly be. Meanwhile, her parents, Helen (Genevieve O’Reilly) and Julius (Alexander England), are reproducing at an alarming rate. Basically, they can no longer afford to feed Sybylla. She doesn’t have any suitor options, so her mother, who came from a higher social stature before marrying her husband, sends Sybylla to her grandmother to get some rearing and learn the ways of courtship. The intent is that Sybylla will no longer be a financial strain on a family with no finances.

Of course, Sybylla has absolutely no intention of marrying anybody, but like I said, these stories rarely ever go the way of abstinence. Of course she’s going to find someone who challenges her, someone who sees her for who she is, someone who starts off on the opposite end of the spectrum before their differences slowly disappear and the two fall in love. In Sybylla’s case, she’s actually experiencing this with more than one man, including Harry Beecham (Christopher Chung) and Frank Hawden (Jake Dunn), although those experiences are quite different. Eventually, she even succumbs to the possibility that love may be the greatest thing of all, asking her mother how she knows what love is. You can already hear the power ballad banging in the background. I wanna know what love is. I want you to show me.

I feel like Jane Austen did this thing better. Maybe Netflix was attracted to My Brilliant Career because a 1901 publication date means the source material is sitting comfortably in the public domain. Whatever the reason, I didn’t find this adaptation interesting enough to stand on its own two feet. Sybylla moves rather clumsily through the various stages of becoming as the series changes settings, puts her obstinate attitude to use, checks it at the door, and then forces her to adapt to the ways of supposedly civilized people. I laughed in one of the earlier episodes when Sybylla is at her grandmother’s estate and, instead of using an indoor bathroom or even an outhouse, she just squats in the yard. It’s such a random moment, and not something we see in too many TV shows or films, but it does answer that eternal question of what people actually did. Sybylla is perfectly comfortable just going outside like she’s been let into the backyard and then strolling back inside when she’s done.

Unfortunately, the series isn’t full of those eccentricities that might have helped differentiate this material from its like-minded competitors. Instead, My Brilliant Career feels like a placeholder while you wait for the next period adaptation. If this is the only genre you watch, and you spend your time bouncing between Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Northanger Abbey, Bridgerton, The Gilded Age, and Downton Abbey, I suppose this fits into that mold somehow. But I can’t imagine it possibly being at the top of anyone’s chart because it becomes extremely predictable to the point of cheesiness. The series will support its lead as quickly as it will betray her, allowing Sybylla to flourish and diminish in rapid succession. In one scene she can be strong and independent, and in the next she’s your typical damsel, quite taken by the kindness of strangers.

The series also has a rather abrupt ending that doesn’t really tie everything together. I actually had to check to make sure this was being billed as a limited series and not something with more potential because we don’t really know if Sybylla’s life works out the way she wants. Her sister doesn’t really get a conclusion. I’m not sure her parents wrap up their storyline. We never really establish the rest of her siblings enough for them to matter. And as far as the last man standing, Sybylla really couldn’t possibly drop him any faster if she tried, and he doesn’t put up much of a fight despite attempting to build the life he believes she deserves.

This was a slog, with occasional moments where I thought it might get interesting, only for it to turn around and do the most predictable thing. It would do something that had been done before and done better. I don’t know if My Brilliant Career needed more episodes or if it needed to be chopped down into a film adaptation, but in its current structure, this didn’t work for me. Sometimes the benefit of shrinking a novel into a movie is that you streamline the main plot. The flip side is that a series theoretically gives you enough time to bring all the little intricacies and details to life. It’s what the Harry Potter TV series is hoping to do. All those scenes and side characters that mega fans complained about being cut from the films? Now they have no excuse. They must be included, or this time the fans truly will riot, and they will be justified in doing so.

Philippa Northeast is fine as Sybylla, but her character is written with such dramatic personality swings that I’m more impressed Northeast was able to keep up with them than I am with any singular moment or triumph. Some of Sybylla’s written words are a little scandalous, especially for 1901, but we’ve already read literature from that period that was starting to push boundaries. Writers were willing to take risks, believe it or not, even all the way back at the turn of the century.

VSI London handled the audio description, and I didn’t really have a problem with the track. Most of my questions are structural within the series itself, either because this material doesn’t adapt particularly well to this format or because six episodes wasn’t the right amount of time for the version they wanted to tell. The audio description can explain what Sybylla is doing, but it can’t fix the feeling that the series itself hasn’t quite decided how much time it needs to tell her story.

If you want to check out My Brilliant Career because you adore the novel, be my guest. I didn’t read the novel, so I have nothing to compare this adaptation to, but the series certainly didn’t impress me enough to make me want to run out and check out the book. I may be alone on this one. I haven’t checked the Tomatometer, and if I end up being the only Rotten review on this show, so be it. I felt like I had seen this a thousand times before, and I was never convinced there was enough here to justify doing it again.

My Brilliant Career doesn’t shine quite like its title suggests. Instead, it gets muddied by a collection of themes and ideas saddled onto one strong female lead and placed into scenarios that have tackled these issues far better in the past. Maybe Miles Franklin got there first in 1901, but Netflix arrived in 2026, and this particular adaptation has to compete with everything that came in between.

Rotten: 5.0/10