About a month ago I wrote this post, talking about why everybody should watch The Lizzie Bennet Diaries. Since then, I’ve been rewatching other web series, so I thought I should do a similar post for LBD’s younger, less popular, but still great sister, Emma Approved. Here are 11 reasons why everybody should watch Emma Approved!

It’s a webseries adaptation of Jane Austen’s Emma

Everybody loves a good Emma retelling almost as much as a Romeo and Juliet or Pride & Prejudice one. Clueless is one of THE classic 90s movies, and the two share all of the best parts of the original.

Emma Woodhouse is just a really great protagonist

You start you questioning whether or not you like her, but once you get a few episodes in you realize that you’ve started rooting for her without even realizing it.

There is so much character development

Emma is a character in this who has the absolute best of intentions but often ends up not thinking things through, or trying to help people who don’t necessarily need to be helped. Dealing with the consequences of her actions lead to really interesting character growth over the course of the series.

Mr. Knightley (Alex), is the perfect foil to Emma, and the ship is adorable

They start out as friends/business partners. I don’t normally love childhood friends-to-lovers stories, but it works here, and I honestly like this romance better than that in the original book. Alex is also much more of a constant in the story than he is in the book, so that’s a plus. He and Emma are so cute together, even well before they get together. They can’t match up to Darcy and Lizzie (very few ships can), but it’s still a really cute ship.

The casting is diverse

Joanna Sotomura, who plays Emma, is half Japanese. Tyra Color and Nikea Gamby-Turner, who play Jane Fairfax and Maddy Bates respectively, are both Black. Additionally, Jessica Jade Andres, who plays Caroline Lee, is half-Filipino, though that’s really more casting from LBD.

I almost like Harriet in it!

I hate her in almost all her versions, but here she’s almost not completely annoying! She’s a necessary character to the plot, but she just irks me, though not as much here as in other adaptations or the original.

The episodes are super short

The series is comprised of 72 4-7 minute episodes, so it’s perfect for bingeing or for sneaking in an episode or two between tasks. There are also auxiliary videos, as with The Lizzie Bennet Diaries (a more popular webseries adaptation of Pride and Prejudice, made by the same company), but they are much less necessary for getting the full experience of the story than they are there.

The setting is perfect for the plot

I love Clueless, but I think that this is even better than that high-school adaptation of Emma. It follows Emma and Alex as they run a lifestyle/event planning company, and it’s just a really fun setup, and markedly different from the graduate-student set-up of The Lizzie Bennet Diaries.

Speaking of The Lizzie Bennet Diaries, it takes place in the same universe!

Caroline Lee has a significant role for about a 10-episode arc, and the revival follows the company as they advise Mr. Collins as he goes through a mid-life crisis. Though everybody would have rather seen them plan the Jing or Dizzie wedding, those two appearances were still neat crossovers between the two shows.

Like The Lizzie Bennet Diaries, there are social media components

Each character had a twitter profile and tweeted often as the series went along, adding depth to the story. There’s also a Tumblr blog and Instagram for the company, which are interesting, though less important to the story.