Welcome to Sanditon

Austen's unfinished novel, completed by its audience

Welcome to Sanditon was the direct follow-up to The Lizzie Bennet Diaries — a transmedia adaptation of Jane Austen's final, unfinished manuscript, produced by Pemberley Digital. Where LBD retold Pride and Prejudice as a vlog, Sanditon tried something more ambitious: an open world set in a fictional California beach town, built to be populated by the audience. Fans were invited to create their own Sanditon residents, film videos through the fictional Domino app, and become part of the story.

The response was immediate. Before the first episode aired, 300 in-character Twitter accounts already existed. Within days, fans had created hospitals, coffee shops, a farmers' market, a newspaper, government offices, and a lighthouse — all populated by characters they'd invented. The Sanditon community grew so fast that Twitter temporarily banned dozens of accounts for following each other too quickly, mistaking an enthusiastic fanbase for a spam network.

Co-creator and showrunner

I co-created and co-showran Welcome to Sanditon with Margaret Dunlap, who was also Co-Executive Producer on LBD. My original pitch identified Sanditon's unfinished text as an opportunity to expand on LBD's immersive elements and invite the audience to play a canonical part in the story.

• Originated the series concept and the open-world participation framework
• Co-wrote central narrative episodes and built canonical episodes from fan-created submissions
• Designed the Domino app platform experience (built with Theatrics) enabling audience video creation
• Oversaw community architecture, in-fiction social presence, and story integration with fan content

Maintaining authorship when the audience writes the story

The central design challenge: how do you keep a story coherent when thousands of people are writing it simultaneously? The answer was structural: Gigi Darcy and the Domino app were the spine, giving every fan-created character a reason to exist in the same place at the same time. The official series drove the plot; fan characters populated the world and made it feel real.

As part of the blockbuster LBD Kickstarter, two fans purchased on-screen roles in the story. I worked with these fans to create characters they felt comfortable embodying and included them in recurring stories throughout the show.

The Domino platform, built with Theatrics, let any fan shoot their own vlogs as Sanditon residents and have them integrated into the canon story world. The challenge wasn't just technical, it was curatorial. The show had to be responsive enough to acknowledge what the community was building while staying focused enough to tell a satisfying story. What we discovered is that the audience mostly needed permission, not direction. Once we opened the doors, they built a town. Every other week, I edited together audience videos from the platform into a compilation video of events around the town.

A living world that outlasted its own production

Welcome to Sanditon was an Emmy finalist for Outstanding Original Interactive Program. Coverage appeared in Wired, Oprah Magazine, Library Journal, Tubefilter, and the Daily Dot.

More than the awards or press, Sanditon demonstrated something specific: the Lizzie Bennet audience wasn't just loyal, they were creative. Given the right architecture and a little space, they would show up and build something real. The world of Sanditon roleplaying continued unbroken for years after the show ended.