The first movie in Hallmark Channel’s Jane Austen series is titled Paging Mr. Darcy. Yes, most of these movies are “Pride and Prejudice” themed. Hopefully this won’t be too bad.

Eloise Cavendish (Mallory Jansen) is a literary professor who specializes in Jane Austen. She is the keynote speaker at this year’s Jane Austen League of America conference. While at the conference, she plans on visiting her sister, Mia (Lillian Doucet-Roche), and meet Dr. Victoria Jennings (Carolyn Scott), a member of the hiring committee at Princeton. After her plane lands, she meets Sam (Will Kemp) dressed as Mr. Darcy. Much to Eloise’s dismay, he is to be her guest liaison for the entire conference. She would rather not partake in the romanticism of Austen’s works. But she does need to impress Dr. Jennings…

I will admit that I’m not a big Jane Austen fan. It’s possible that most of these movies will go right over my head. With that noted, Paging Mr. Darcy is rather boring. Eloise is against all of the costumes and the ball and the general party vibe of the conference. But from what I saw, all of that barely took place. Sure, Sam was dressed as Mr. Darcy most of the time but that was his job. And even then, he took some pictures with some attendees in the beginning then he was busy crafting bonnets with Dr. Jennings, who happens to be his aunt, or hanging out with Eloise - teaching her how to dance, making desserts for the ball, or just randomly chatting. If I was an attendee, I might think this was the worst conference ever. Especially with a keynote speaker that didn’t even want to be there!

Since this is the first movie in the Loveuary series, I’m really hoping the other movies will be better. Hallmark has this weird tendency to put the worst movies in the beginning of the season and the really good ones either smack dab in the middle or at the very end. Cross your fingers the rest of these are better.

Rating: C-