The 2021 BBC and BYUtv adaptation of The Canterville Ghost by Oscar Wilde is a four-episode miniseries following an eventful year at a haunted castle and the surrounding community. 21st-Century Eagleland Tech Bro Hiram Otis and his family buy the castle with the goal of coming closer together after recent unhappy events. Sir Simon (Anthony Head), an unhappy ghost who has spent centuries haunting the castle, has surprisingly little impact on their plans or lifestyle, to his frustration. The Otis family forms close bonds among the remaining Canterville descendants and the Romani Lovell family, who helped build the castle during Sir Simon's day. Before the year is out, the three families will have had their share of treasure hunting, ghost-hunting, mysteries about the legendary fate of Sir Simon, complicated romance, bankruptcy proceedings, a trial before a Celestial Bureaucracy, and the fate of Sir Simon's immortal soul all three families find themselves in.
Tropes in the series:
- Action Mom: Flashbacks show Ethlinda Lovell hunting game with a bow and arrow to provide for herself and her baby after their exile.
- Adaptational Job Change: Hiram Otis is an inventor and industrialist rather than a diplomat like in the book.
- Adaptation Name Change: Stars and Stripes are renamed Theodore and Franklin (referencing the Roosevelt presidents).
- Adaptational Nice Guy: Like most adaptations, this one makes Sir Simon more sympathetic than he was in the original by having his wife have died due to a Betrayal by Inaction rather than an outright murder and Simon have been trying to save her after some soul-searching when he was waylaid and entombed alive .
- Adaptational Villainy: Sir Simon's killers and brothers-in-law are never pure paragons, but are portrayed as being justified in avenging their sister in the book and most adaptations. Here, they killed Simon for refusing to take in their sister and his child during a cold winter day while at the same time refusing to provide her any aid themselves due to seeing her as Defiled Forever. Also, Simon was about to go after their sister with food and money and run away with her when they attack him, so by killing him they inadvertently doomed her to die.
- Age-Gap Romance: After her fiancée starts becoming interested in Ginny Otis, Moppy Stilton develops a mild flirtation with Django Lovell that develops into a Pair the Spares Maybe Ever After. Moppy is approximately college-aged, while Django isn't quite middle-aged but has 13-year-old twin daughters.
- Age Without Youth: Downplayed with Sir Simon. He doesn't age anywhere near the rate he did as a human, but being a ghost hasn't stopped him from physically aging a few decades in the five hundred years since his death and he says that if he never breaks the curse binding him to Earth, he'll eventually be reduced to ghostly dust and bones in an And I Must Scream state.
- Artistic License – Law: Virginia wants to drop out of law school because she made a mistake while representing an eighteen-year-old girl who killed her abusive stepfather, causing evidence to be suppressed and the girl to be sentenced to life without parole, with Virginiana saying that the girl's life is ruined because of her and nothing can change that. While it's hard to tell without knowing the exact details, that scenario sounds like potential grounds for an ineffective assistance of counsel appeal in real life.
- Ascended Extra: The Romanis staying on the estate grounds in the original book are merely there for Mr. Otis to get distracted, suspecting them when he can't find his daughter. In this series, they are main characters whose family had a large role in the history of the castle and who become close friends and allies of the Otis's.
- Badass Bookworm: The bespectacled, tech-obsessed Otis twins are trained in aikido.
- Bait-and-Switch: In the third episode, Moppy dramatically barges in to announce her Arranged Marriage wedding with Cecil is off right after he was seen developing feelings for Ginny, and Cecil is summoned for a tense meeting. It turns out he never called off the wedding (yet) and what she meant was they had to change the date to accommodate a celebrity guest.
- Bridezilla: Downplayed with Moppy. She fixates on planning an opulent wedding with Cecil that only the most posh and respected people will attend, with her father secretly dreading how much her dream wedding will cost him. But she is only obsessed with having such a wedding if she marries Cecil rather than caring about having that wedding no matter what and is calm and friendly after their broken engagement.
- Celestial Bureaucracy: When Ginny decides to defend Simon to the Angel of Death, she finds herself being handed a file from a large pile by an apathetic civil servant Angel while the Angel of Death serves as a Stern Old Judge and coldly formal courtroom proceedings are regularly done to decide the fates of the deceased.
- Death by Childbirth: Patience and Charity Lovell's mother died when they were born.
- Everyone Can See It: The chemistry between Cecil and Ginny is obvious to her mother and his grandmother and best friend long before the two actually admit anything to each other.
- Everyone Is Related: Downplayed, but four families make up about 3/4ths of the main and recurring cast, and of those families, it turns out the Otises are descended from the centuries-ago marriage of Sir Simon and Ethelinda Lovell, while the Cantervilles are descendants of Simon and his second wife (whose brothers are also the ancestors of Lady Deborah, who married into the modern Cantervilles) and the current Lovells descend from Ethelinda’s brothers. If the Stiltons (the fourth family) had married into the Cantervilles like they originally planned then all three of the other families would be (very, very) distant relatives of the Otises by blood or marriage even before Ginny Otis marries Cecil Canterville.
- Evil Matriarch: Lady Deborah is a cold, snobbish, greedy manipulator, while her son and grandson are much nicer but sometimes struggle under her thumb.
- Has a Type: Ralph Stilton seems to like charming Girly Girl with a Tomboy Streak outdoorswomen, bonding with Ginny over horseback riding and flirting with a well-dressed wedding guest who knows how to fly fish.
- Historical Villain Upgrade:
- In-Universe, the centuries-old rumors that Sir Simon was murdered by his brothers-in-law has led to many tainting the Cecils, the brothers of his wife, Lady Eleanor, with that reputation (to the annoyance of their descendant, Lady Deborah) even though they were small children with no motive at the time Simon died. The actual culprits were the brothers of his semi-secret first wife.
- Simon himself is condemned for murdering his wife (and for his ghostly actions, which are his fault) even though Lady Eleanor outlived him. Even with the reveal that he had a another wife, the worst he did was let his father bully him out of giving her food, money or shelter during the winter, and even then he quickly changed his mind.
- Informed Flaw: Promos call Patience and Charity Lovell poorly named girls who are equally as rambunctious as the Otis twins, but in the show itself, they come across as nice, level-headed, and well-adjusted stabilizing influences to the boys (although they do join them in snooping around for a treasure hunt).
- Missing Mom: Cecil Canterville's mother ran off with a bridge player when he was a baby, and the mother of his fiancée Moppy and her brother Ralph left to become a Buddhist nun in Thailand when they were young.
- My Greatest Failure: Ginny is a law student deeply disillusioned and guilt-ridden by failing to provide a desperate young woman the proper pro bono work due to the firm being underfunded.
- My Rule Fu Is Stronger than Yours: Ginny is a law student who clashes with some of the (living) Cantervilles about whether she can enter a riding competition restricted to boys, with them each pulling out rules about whether it's legal to ban girls or whether she has to have a weight penalty which would ruin her chances (she gets around it by riding bareback).
- Noodle Incident: It is repeatedly mentioned one of the twins was expelled from school back in America for an act of arson, but few details are given.
- Roguish Poacher: The long-dead Simeon Otis was fined for poaching in the woods but had a family of nine kids to support and was willing to adopt a tenth despite those heavy demands when he found an orphaned baby in the woods.
- Royals Who Actually Do Something: Cecil is planning to start a green energy and economic renewal program on his grandmother's estate once he inherits it.
- "Scooby-Doo" Hoax: Downplayed. Like in all versions, Sir Simon is a real ghost, but his descendant by marriage, Lady Deborah, hides his existence while selling the family castle to the Otis Family, implicitly hoping that they'll abandon the castle because of the ghost because her contract would let her reclaim the mansion and keep the purchase price if they do so.
- Someone to Remember Him By: Sir Simon's second wife was pregnant when his first wife's brothers killed him, ensuring the survival of the main branch of the de Cantervilles into the present day, although, unlike most instances of the trope, it was a loveless marriage and he already had another child from his first wife.
- Team Pet: The Otis and Lovell twins meet when the boys help the girls get their terrier back from some bullies and the dog follows the four on their subsequent treasure hunt.
- Tech Bro: Hiram is a plain-spoken man who got rich on his inventions and runs a MegaCorp. He lacks the arrogance of most examples of the trope, never liking or excelling at boardroom culture and eventually leaving the day-to-day running of his company to his longtime number two. Unfortunately, that guy also proves to be more of a technician than a businessman and runs the company into the ground.
- Theseus' Ship Paradox: When her beloved vacuum cleaner of fifty years breaks down, Mrs. Umney declines to have Hiram Otis fix it after he examines it and says he would have to replace all of the old internal parts.
- Uncle Pennybags: Hiram Otis is a Fiction 500 tycoon who is quite humble and generous for his wealth, letting the Lovells move their caravan onto his land and offering to anonymously pay to replace the entire church roof due to how it's partially leaking because of how he angered Sir Simon's ghost into summoning a storm.
- Underdogs Never Lose: The Canterville estate-sponsored cricket team gets no volunteers except a man with a bad knee and various Otises and Lovells who have never played cricket before, while the other team is much more equipped. In a twist, while the Otis team does win, this is more because of a last-minute influx of experienced players from the village than because of the individual underdog players proving better than expected.
- The Un-Favorite: Sir Simon's father briefly appears in the afterlife. He says that he was a disappointing wastrel who was weaker than his brother and that it's neither fair nor understandable that Simon was the son who survived a bout of fever. When Ginny asks if he even loved Simon at all, he refuses to answer affirmatively.
- Underdressed for the Occasion: The Otises arrive to meet the Canterville descendants while dressed more like they would for a walk than for the formal cocktail party they find themselves at. Lady Canterville's son actually admits to finding their choice of dress more practical for the hot weather, but his mother won't let him take off his suit.
- Upper-Class Equestrian: Blue Blood Cecil Canterville is introduced galloping horses through a field, dressed in a nice riding outfit, and sharing a smile with Ginny (herself a rider and the daughter of a Tech Bro tycoon).
- When You Coming Home, Dad?: Early in the series, both Otis parents admit that they spent too much time at their jobs to help their children become well-adjusted, which they hope to change at the castle.