My Brilliant Career Review: ★★★☆☆ (3/5)
My Brilliant Career is a lively, entertaining, and visually gorgeous Netflix period drama that updates Miles Franklin’s 1901 feminist novel with Bridgerton-style energy and modern sensibilities — it occasionally tips into over-the-top sentimentality and melodrama, but Philippa Northeast’s infectious, wonderfully human performance as Sybylla keeps the whole thing grounded and genuinely watchable throughout all six episodes. If you are looking for something breezy, romantic, and occasionally quite cheeky for the weekend, this one delivers.
Rating: ★★★☆☆ (3/5)
Director: Alyssa McClelland, Anne Renton
Platform: Netflix
Episodes: 6
Cast: Philippa Northeast, Christopher Chung, Jake Dunn, Anna Chancellor, Kate Mulvany
Release: August 13, 2026
Miles Franklin wrote My Brilliant Career in 1901, when she was just eighteen years old, and the novel has never really stopped feeling relevant.
Its heroine Sybylla Melvyn is stubborn, ambitious, occasionally impossible to be around, and completely unwilling to accept that her only future is a husband and a quiet life. In a world that kept insisting she settle down and stop making noise, she kept writing.
For a book that is 125 years old, it crackles with a very modern kind of energy. Netflix’s new six-episode adaptation knows this and leans into it hard. Created by Liz Doran, this is not a reverent, stately period piece in the tradition of Gillian Armstrong’s acclaimed 1979 film.
It is warmer, louder, steamier, and considerably cheekier — think Bridgerton with an Australian bush setting and a genuinely feminist backbone. The approach will not work for everyone, but it works far more often than it does not.
The story follows Sybylla as she leaves her struggling rural family and arrives at her wealthy grandmother’s estate at Caddagat, sent there in the hope of finding a suitable husband.
Sybylla has other ideas. She wants to experience the world so she can write about it honestly, and Caddagat gives her more experience than she bargained for — particularly in the form of two very different men competing for her attention.
Harry Beecham, played by Christopher Chung in a deliberately modern reimagining of the character as Chinese Australian, is charming, principled, and the kind of handsome that Sybylla tries and fails to be entirely unaffected by. Frank, played by Jake Dunn, is the estate’s foreman — rougher, less socially polished, and also clearly smitten.
The love triangle gives the series its romantic engine, and while it occasionally reduces the sharper edges of Sybylla’s conflict with the world to a question of which man she should choose, the series is smart enough to know that the real story is always about her choices as a woman rather than simply as a potential wife.
Philippa Northeast is the reason to watch this. She plays Sybylla with an impishness and warmth that makes you root for her even when she is being spectacularly stubborn.
Her performance has the kind of youthful energy that feels completely unforced — you believe entirely that this is a person who is figuring herself out in real time, making mistakes, and refusing to apologise for any of them. It is a star-making turn in a role that required exactly this kind of commitment.
Related Article: Mourinho Netflix Review
The supporting cast is generally strong. Anna Chancellor as the grandmother, Kate Mulvany as the suffragist aunt who immediately recognises something in Sybylla worth encouraging, and Genevieve O’Reilly all bring genuine presence to their roles.
The modern touches — contemporary music in the soundtrack, diverse casting, a gay romance subplot — are hit and miss. Some feel organic, others slightly grafted on for modern appeal.
The series stumbles most noticeably in its final episodes, where the emotional beats tip into sentimentality the story has not quite earned and a montage sequence arrives that feels like it belongs in a different, considerably softer show.
Still, My Brilliant Career is an easy, enjoyable watch that honours its source material’s spirit without being enslaved to it.
My Brilliant Career is now streaming on Netflix. All 6 episodes available.