Prior to the Jane Austen boom of the 1990s, almost all film versions of her novels were made for television and conformed to the conventions of the BBC classic drama house style. Film adaptations such as Emma (1972), Pride and Prejudice (1979), Mansfield Park (1983), and Sense and Sensibility (1981/1985) are, therefore, characterized by their textual fidelity, solid acting, and use of historically accurate settings and costumes. However, pleasing as it has been to millions of viewers, the “verisimilitude” carefully cultivated by televisual renderings of the Austen canon is usually “superficial” and serves as a substitute for any attempt to point up the complexities of character and theme that lie beneath the polished surface of her novels. Pre-1990 BBC adaptations also tend to make use of unobtrusive and conservative camera and editing techniques that reflect their creators' unwillingness to rethink Austen's novels in visual terms. By and large, televised versions of Austen function as illustrated supplements to the original novels rather than as independent works of art. The only exception to this norm is the 1987 feature-length production of Northanger Abbey, which – as its lurid dramatizations of Catherine Morland's Gothic imaginings and its willingness to take liberties with Austen's text demonstrate – is free from the kind of stultifying reverence for a classic work that, in George Bluestone's opinion, usually “inhibit[s] the plastic imagination.”