Meet the Benedettos

Meet the Benedettos, by Katie Cotugno, is a reality show/Jane Austen mashup. Five sisters struggles to escape being a reality-TV punchline and turn their fame into something lasting, as their social-climbing mother and gauche New Jersey father ignore their upcoming foreclosure.

Oddly, this isn’t my first Pride and Prejudice reality show retelling. Curtis Sittenfeld’s Eligible reimagines Dr. Chip Bingley as a highly desirable contestant on a dating reality show. This update works well, because any modernized Pride and Prejudice has to cope with the shift in culture, that young women now just wouldn’t have the same pressure to marry well, or to be forced to live as a sad spinster on a (male) relative’s charity. Without that expectation, it’s hard to understand why the characters take the actions they do (especially Mrs. Bennet or Charlotte Lucas) or to feel any pressure about the romances.

In Meet the Benedettos, the Benedetto family has tacky reality-show fame.  This is a solid modernization of the Bennets’ social status, because a reality show isn’t shady or illegal, but it’s generally considered tacky and talentless work, and that’s especially clear when compared to their Los Angeles neighbors, the superhero-action star Bingley and the aspiring theater actor Will Darcy. This fits the vibe of Longbourn in the original.

Reality-show stardom hasn’t turned out to be as profitable as they’d hoped and expected, which also fits the vibe of life at Longbourn. There’s a hint that Papa Benedetto would have been perfectly happy running his New Jersey pizza parlors in peace, but now he’s in LA, ignoring the foreclosure notices and past-due bills.

I liked the relationships between the sisters, although I found Mary oddly flat and underused. She’s constantly overlooked by her sisters, kind of like in the original P&P, usually off doing unexplained and unquestioned activities, but appears whenever there’s a heartwarming moment with all the sisters together. Lydia and Kitty are lifestyle influencers, which is a perfect updating for “two of the silliest girls in the country” in the original. Kitty starts making and selling creative handicrafts, which won’t exactly earn enough to solve the Benedettos’ financial woes and gets plenty of dismissive remarks, but her big sisters are proud of her, anyway.  It’s another solid updating of the vibes from the original.

The book flows well, with smart and descriptive language.  The plot follows the basic beats of the original, although Caroline Bingley gets an update. She’s still not a fan of the Benedettos, and she’s still part of separating Bingley and Jane, but her motivations are about managing his career, which she does very successfully. Will Darcy is fine, there’s nice, believable chemistry between Will and Lilly, while keeping the focus on the sisters.

I enjoyed Meet the Benedettos in general, but the ending is vague and unsatisfying. Many Austen modernizations struggle with this aspect because 200ish years after Pride and Prejudice came out, two sisters marrying well just doesn’t have the same feel. I wasn’t exactly looking for a double wedding, or Lilly to be swept off her feet, but still, I wanted… something. Anything. I almost always find a character’s revelation that they need to write a book kinda annoying, and it’s doubly annoying in place of fully resolving the storylines.