Bridgerton: Escapist drama
Regency- era series subtly takes on issues of race and identity
We were two separate societies divided by colour until a king fell in love with one of us,” the quick- witted Lady Danbury ( Adjoa Andoh) tells her protege, the Duke of Hastings. “Look at everything it is doing for us, allowing us to become.”
She insists, “Love, Your Grace, conquers all.”
Appearing in the fourth episode of Bridgerton, the first series produced by Shonda Rhimes as part of her powerhouse Netflix deal, this conversation between the show’s main Black characters is the first explicit mention of race in a story that revolves around the duke, a Black man named Simon Basset ( Rege- Jean Page), and his passionate courtship of Daphne ( Phoebe Dynevor), eldest daughter in the wealthy, white and titled Bridgerton family.
The show’s casting diversity is its most immediately striking quality, not just in Black aristocratic characters like the duke and Lady Danbury, but also in the entrepreneurial Madame Genevieve Delacroix ( Kathryn Drysdale) and the working- class couple Will and Alice Mondrich ( Martins Imhangbe and Emma Naomi). All of them are central to the complicated social caste system in the show’s version of early 1800s London.
Bridgerton is not Rhimes’ first dalliance with a multiracial cast in a British period drama. In 2017, she produced Still Star- Crossed on ABC, a story that began after the deaths of Romeo and Juliet and focused on their cousins Benvolio Montague and Rosaline Capulet, who were forced to marry in order to heal the family rift. Although Benvolio and Rosaline are intentionally cast as a interracial couple, race was neither a point of contention nor grist for social commentary. Instead, viewers were asked to suspend our contemporary racial perceptions in order to accept the colorblind Verona of the past. ( This strategy, among others, was largely unsuccessful — Still Star- Crossed was cancelled after only one season.)
In contrast, the characters of Bridgerton never seem to forget their blackness but instead understand it as one of the many facets of their identity. The show’s success proves that people of colour do not have to be erased or exist solely as victims of racism in order for a British costume drama to flourish.
Chris Van Dusen, the Bridgerton showrunner, was a writer on Rhimes’ Grey’s Anatomy before going on to be a co- executive producer of Scandal, a show that recognised but did not entirely revolve around the interracial tensions of Olivia Pope’s romantic relationships. Applying that same approach to his adaptations of Julia Quinn’s Bridgerton
novels, Van Dusen places us in an early 19th century Britain ruled by a Black woman, Queen Charlotte ( Golda Rosheuvel).
“It made me wonder what that could have looked like,” Van Dusen told The New York Times in a recent feature about the show. “Could she have used her power to elevate other people of colour in society? Could she have given them titles and lands and dukedoms?”
Such a move pushes back against the racial homogeneity of hit period dramas like Downton Abbey, which that show’s executive producer, Gareth Neame, insisted was necessary for historical accuracy.
Bridgerton provides a blueprint for British period shows in which Black characters can thrive within the melodramatic storylines, extravagant costumes and bucolic beauty that make such series so appealing, without having to be servants or enslaved.
For all its innovations, Bridgerton has its own blind spots. I found it strange that only the Black characters speak about race, a creative decision that risks reinforcing the very white privilege it seeks to undercut by enabling its white characters to be free of racial identity.
When Lady Danbury expresses her optimistic belief in the power of love, the duke is more circumspect, countering that Black progress is fragile and dependent on the whims of whichever white king is in charge. But to actually see narrative evidence of this precariousness, you have to turn to other recent British period dramas that featured integral Black characters, like The Spanish Princess and Sanditon.
Taking place in Tudor England, The Spanish Princess on Starz features Stephanie Levi- John as a Black woman named Lina who came to England as Catherine of Aragon’s lady- in- waiting. Based on an actual historical figure, the show thoughtfully fictionalises her struggle between her loyalty to Catherine and her love for her Moorish husband, Oviedo, as xenophobia rises throughout the kingdom.
The series is set in the 16th century during a historical epoch in which slavery and race were not inextricably linked. Here, Lina’s brown skin merely indicates her foreignness rather than marks her oppression.
By the time we reach the early 19th- century world of PBS’ Sanditon, however, the long arm of the slave trade has reached the British seaside resort of the title. Adapted by Andrew Davies from an unfinished novel by Jane Austen, Sanditon expands the story of Miss Georgiana Lambe, Austen’s first Black character. Described briefly in the manuscript as a “mulatto” born to a white slaveholding father and enslaved Black mother in the British colony of Antigua, Georgiana in the series is an heiress, played by Crystal Clarke, whose wealth and exotic beauty make her the most sought after young woman in England’s south coast.
But racial trauma remains.
Despite the attention she receives, Georgiana is ultimately alienated in England because of her race, an experience that I found more realistic than Marina Thompson’s ( Ruby Barker), another biracial debutante who also finds herself alone at court in Bridgerton.