This production stars Kate Beckinsale as the title character, and also features Samantha Morton as Harriet Smith and Mark Strong as Mr. Knightley.

Davies had recently made the successful 1995 television serial Pride and Prejudice for the BBC when he proposed to adapt Emma for the corporation.

Miss Emma Woodhouse lives with her father on his Hartfield estate in the small Surrey town of Highbury, and is young, pretty, and rich.

In a contribution for the 2007 book Literary Intermediality: The Transit of Literature Through the Media Circuit, Lydia Martin noted that unlike the 1996 theatrical film starring Paltrow, Davies' Emma displays a "realistic, or even naturalistic, approach by focusing on the lower classes in which Jane Austen never really took any interest.

Davies provides social context with fleeting scenes of the lower classes in a neutral, educational way – unlike the 1995 film Persuasion, Emma does not encourage viewers to identify with the servants.

People's Tom Gliatto found it to be superior to the 1996 film, attributing this to Beckinsale's performance: "Paltrow played the part with a swanlike haughtiness.

"[9] Gliatto also positively commented on Davies' script for "captur[ing] not just Austen's light charm but the pinpricks of her social criticism.

"[9] Caryn James of The New York Times added that in a story with an unlikeable heroine, Beckinsale "walks [the] fine line beautifully... [She] is plainer looking than Ms. Paltrow's, and altogether more believable and funnier.

[10] Writing for The Washington Post, Megan Rosenfeld praised the production and especially saved positive comment for Beckinsale, whom she called perhaps "the best [Emma] of all" the previous adaptations of the novel.

The actress, Rosenfeld opined, "looks at home in the dresses, cavernous houses and rolling countryside of Austen's 19th-century England, and yet seems modern in her alertness and in her way of not being intimidated by men.

Davies, remarked the newspaper, "has written a pithy, direct Emma that, unlike his script for Pride and Prejudice, clocks in at a fraction of the time it takes to read the book.