This four-part BBC television serial was written by Sandy Welch, who had previously adapted other BBC costume dramas such as Jane Eyre and North & South, and was directed by Jim O'Hanlon.

Principal photography began with a four-day shoot in the Kent village of Chilham from 14 to 18 April 2009, timed to coincide with the Easter school holiday to minimise disruption to locals.

To make Chilham look period-appropriate, production design staff covered several roads with gravel to disguise modern 21st-century road markings and erected a fountain in the village square.

Filming in Chilham took place daily from 8 a.m. to 7 p.m.

Wedding and Sunday service scenes were filmed at the parish church of St. Mary the Virgin in Send, Surrey on 24 and 28 April, while many interior scenes were shot at Squerryes Court in Westerham, Kent.

The scene of Emma and Harriet Smith walking to visit the poor was filmed in Hatfield, Hertfordshire, with the church seen along the wooded path being St Etheldreda's Church, Hatfield.

The original soundtrack, composed by Samuel Sim, was released on 8 December 2009 and includes music from the dance sequences during the ball at the Crown Inn.

While the first episode was well received by critics, viewership dropped significantly over the series, with the second episode drawing about 3.5 million viewers (nearly 1 million fewer than the opener) and losing another 200,000 by the third episode, a decline some attributed to competition from ITV1's popular results show for The X Factor airing the same Sunday nights.

Critical opinion soured after the strong first episode; The Telegraph's John Preston called the third episode 'a disaster' with obtrusive narration and insufficiently developed secondary characters, while The Independent's Tom Sutcliffe felt Jonny Lee Miller was miscast as Mr Knightley because he still carried too much of a 'seductive bad boy' quality.