Aimless ponderings inspired by Netflix’s Bridgerton

For those who may not know, the tl:dr is this: back in 2018, Shonda Rhimes, a USian producer of several very successful shows, bought the rights to adapt Julia Quinn’s very white genre romance Bridgertons book series (see footnote ¹). Three series within that universe have been released by Netflix since, with a fourth coming out later this summer.

This was controversial enough for many genre romance readers, who to this day argue that there are many Black authored and Black centered who deserved the investment (in money and attention) of such a prominent Black woman in the industry. (footnote ²)

The uproar only got louder, but from the opposite direction ::cough racist white readers cough:: when it came out that the production would color-wash the stories, by casting Black actors in several key roles, and setting the series in an alternative universe Britain–one in which the Queen, born Sophie Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, was indeed a Black woman (see footnote ³), marrying into the very white British royal family, and thus ensuring the elevation of Britain’s free Black people into the aristocracy.

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The first season eight-episode season of Netflix’s Bridgerton, loosely based on The Duke and I, went on to become the most watched show in the streaming service history within days (if not hours) of its release; the second season, even more loosely based on The Viscount Who Loved Me, topped this feat.

And even as season two was being filmed, Shonda Rhimes conceived of a prequel of sorts, centered on the historical figure of Queen Charlotte–but again, making her a Black woman. One of the plot threads of that series concerns the ennoblement of wealthy free Black families, which in turn explains these in-universe for the series as a whole.

While not as successful as the first two seasons-cum-series, Queen Charlotte: A Bridgerton Story was quite successful in its own right, and all three remain quite popular and profitable for Netflix–enough so that the release of the third Bridgerton season (based, for some reason, on Romancing Mr. Bridgerton, the fourth novel), has just been announced for May and June.

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Now, here’s the thing: I have not yet watched any Bridgerton, as I don’t “do” streaming subscriptions. All I know of the series today comes from seeing discussions on twitter back in the day (before this happened), and the multitude of clips from the series that flooded YouTube with the release of each installment. That said:

After the long-awaited announcement of series 3 a few days ago, the almighty YouTube algorithm has, once again, flooded my recommendations with Bridgerton clips and fan edits. Being weak (Regé-Jean Page could make flan look sexy; hell, he could make flan horny, provided the flan goes for men), I kept watching, until I got pretty deep into the clips released by Netflix and Shondaland, including interviews and panels with the main cast, upon which time I realized a few things.

One, a dedicated reader of U.S.-published historical romance knows more late-1700s through to late-1800s British history, especially as it pertains social mores and the attitudes of the aristocracy, than many Brits today–and that’s honestly fucking sad, given how much of the Regency in genre romance is based on Georgette Heyer’s racist and antisemitic attitudes (see footnote ⁴).

Two, though the Queen Charlotte series plays fast and loose with the timeline of George III’s mental illness, and plays up the fact that he never took a mistress (in marked contrast with his father, his brother, and his own sons), as an indicator of deep love between the two, the fact is that the couple conceived fifteen children together over a twenty-one year period. It’s hard to believe that their union was so fruitful out of duty and nothing more; seven of their sons lived well into middle age, so it’s not as if they kept trying just to get “the heir and the spare”. (Mind you, even with that many sons, the line of succession was fraught for decades, eventually coming down to 18 year old Victoria, only legitimate daughter of Edward, the fourth son.)

Third, regardless of the fantasist trappings and “colorblind” politics of the show, it seems that the series treats George III’s mental illness with a lot of compassion, and it emphasizes the immense weight that royalty places on the fragile humans upon whose heads crowns are placed: from Queen Charlotte’s isolation–she didn’t speak English when she married George as a 17 year old, and was essentially alone in England, utterly dependent on him for everything from position to companionship–to the precariousness of her position as the King’s mental health deteriorated (she and her eldest son, the eventual Prince Regent and later King George IV, became estranged for several years over the matter of the Regency).

Fourth, it was Queen Charlotte who set up the first honest-to-goodness Christmas tree in Britain, something that remained mildly controversial among the more stiff-necked families of the Ton for decades, as it was considered “a foreign custom”–which is hilarious when you consider that George III was the first Hanoverian monarch whose first language was English rather than German (see item 1 in this list), and further supports the idea that white aristocrats resented a Queen that they may have perceived as not-quite-white.

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I’m not saying that the producers are entirely off the hook for their erasure of historical (and present day) racism, especially because I haven’t seen any reports about the show taking pains to explain just how far from the historical record it strays; and the assumption that today’s viewers would just know it’s fantasy doesn’t hold any water (see back to point one above).

In fact, in all the actor interviews I’ve watched so far, I was most impressed by what Arsema Thomas (Black USian actor who portrays young Lady Danbury in Queen Charlotte) had to say about how race is treated in-universe, and by what Nicola Coughlan (white Irish actor who plays Penelope Featherington in Bridgerton), had to say, likewise, regarding feminism and female agency. (One guess what these two have in common, vis-à-vis the rest of the cast.)

I am saying, however, is that, as a love story between two young people, one of whom suffers from debilitating mental health issues, who find their closest friend and staunchest ally in each other, it’s likely worth watching.

And so, I may do a short Netflix trial later this year (if that’s a thing that one can do–have I mentioned I don’t do streaming subscriptions?), with the aim of bingeing all four series in the Bridgerton universe.

SPOILER: this is very much a change in my perspective; I was all set on never watching anything Bridgerton-related, because of Julia Quinn’s well documented racism, and not wanting to put any of my hard-earned cash in her pocket.

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¹ You can find the list of books in the series, with publication dates, blurbs, and buy links, here at FantasticFiction.

² Two well-known examples: any and all of Ms Beverly Jenkins books, especially her historical novels, all set in the U.S. to boot (listed here); and Alyssa Cole’s Loyal League books set in the U.S. Civil War (listed here).

³ Rumors about the ‘ambiguous’ race of King George III’s Queen have been circulating for a very long time; today, more than a few people in North Carolina will tell you that Charlotte, the city, with its majority Black population, was named in honor of “the Empire’s Black Queen”. (see this 1997 Frontline article providing a plausible and suitably Black family tree for Charlotte, and this line (unsourced): “On this side of the Atlantic, the slogan: “the Queen of England was a Negro woman” was weaponized by the vice admiral, Sir Alexander Cochrane, in his campaign to persuade enslaved people to defect to the British during the 1812 War. “; this 2009 piece in The Guardian, which includes this sentence (unsourced): “Even her physician, Baron Christian Friedrich Stockmar, reportedly described the elderly queen as ‘small and crooked, with a true mulatto face’.”; a search on amazon books for “Invisible Queen” shows at least two titles (one, two) published in the late 2010s in which Queen Charlotte’s Blackness is presented as historical fact).

⁴ There are exceptions, but not for nothing many genre readers use “wallpaper historical” and “Regency chronotope” to tag many of these books; they are set in their own alternative universe, only it’s rarely acknowledge as such, because it’s all white, all wealthy/titled, all the time.