I was looking for a new series to stream, as the time it takes on the streaming services for me to choose a movie almost requires as much time as watching the movie. At least with a series, your choice is pre-determined for many sessions. “Bridgerton” has a new season (#3), and I had never tested it; Grace had it on her list for future viewing, because she was an English literature major and knew the Regency period in England well.
I had quite a bit of trepidation approaching “Bridgerton” because it’s another Shandaland production. I eventually baled on every Shonda Rhimes show I’ve ever sampled, including her flagship, “Grey’s Anatomy”: they are all over-heated soap operas with less nuance than “Dallas.”
But what the hell. I started Episode 1 last night and made it maybe a third of the way through. The production values were high, and the acting was Masterpiece Theater-level at least. It had only two gratuitous and vigorous coitus scenes, which is less than the average for a Shondaland production. I could not, however, stomach the African-Americans and British aristocrats-of-color wandering around early 19th Century English social scene.
It wasn’t just historical nonsense, it was jarring and absurd. This not only didn’t happen, it couldn’t happen, and every time a snooty high-born socialite played by an Asian, Hispanic or Black with an impeccable upper-class English accent appeared, it yanked me right out of the period, the show, and any involvement I might have had, which was admittedly not much to begin with. King George III’s wife, Queen Charlotte, is black in the series. Sure, that’s likely.
As I have written here often, I have no objection ethically or artistically to non-traditional casting, if it works, and if it is done for the right reason, that being art and entertainment value rather than virtue-signalling and politics. Watching “Bridgerton,” which presents itself as a period piece and costume drama, I felt complicit in a particularly blatant and obtrusive DEI exercise.
When woke critic Salamishah Tillet of The New York Times first assessed the show, she wrote, “Bridgerton provides a blueprint for British period shows in which Black characters can thrive within the melodramatic story lines, extravagant costumes and bucolic beauty […] without having to be servants or enslaved.” Ah. So the series’s purpose is to employ minority actors and to re-write history that we are apparently not permitted to know about because some find reality too painful to endure. That’s enough to attract critical praise from a Times drama critic: funny, I would think her function would be to encourage superior entertainment, not in-your-face social engineering.
I became really annoyed when I read the disingenuous explanation by the show’s director, who blathered that “Bridgerton” is “a reimagined world, we’re not a history lesson, it’s not a documentary.” He went on, “What we’re really doing with the show is marrying history and fantasy in what I think is a very exciting way. One approach that we took to that is our approach to race.”
Riiiight. Tell me another. The artifice of pretending that in a society defined by a rigid class hierarchy blacks would magically face no obstacles to achieving social status despite being, by definition, outsiders adds absolutely nothing to the dramatic value of the show except that it pleases audience members whose life revolves around pursuing “social justice.” Naturally, “Bridgerton” has received many awards because the people who give out such awards are of the same stripe as the people who have turned Disney into a woke propaganda machine. (Remember, the new Snow White is “of-color.”) Sticking black characters where they couldn’t possibly have been is “exciting”? It’s a cliché now! If the director really wanted to be edgy and daring, he should have cast the show with midgets, bearded ladies, amputees. The Regency society scene with everyone in wheelchairs!
The DEI fad is destructive, divisive and discriminatory, and “Bridgerton” is just part of its promotional strategy. I felt like a DEI enabler watching the thing.
Looks like it’s back to “Columbo”…
Ethics Alarms 
I tried to give it a chance—and barely got through it. Your assessment is quite correct, and I can add nothing more.
I completely agree with your assessment, I haven’t watched Bridgerton for the same exact reason. I have a BA in History and am a member of Phi Alpha Theta, the Honors Society for History majors and I read a lot of history in my spare time.
There is no way on Earth a black or Asian person could have been a noble in Regency England, which was a very class-stratified society far more rigid than modern-day Great Britain. The very few non-white people would have been servants or slaves or perhaps diplomats or visiting wealthy people from other parts of the British Empire, slavery had not yet been abolished in the empire.
Queen Charlotte being portrayed as black is because of her ancestry, her distant ancestor Madragana, the mistress of King Afonso III of Portugal, was said in historical documents to be “Moorish”. Moors were North African people of mostly Arab and Berber ancestry along with some ancestry from the Vandal and Visigoth peoples who migrated to North Africa after the fall of the Roman Empire.
Queen Charlotte was described by many contemporary sources as being “ugly” with “Negroid” features, while she certainly was a very homely woman, both her parents were German. Many white people do have curly hair and big lips without any African ancestry, Queen Charlotte just happened to be a very plain and homely white woman with these features
With the new rules in Hollywood, as I understand them, new productions wouldn’t be eligible for notable awards if they don’t include diverse casts. There’s probably a lot of pressure from networks and financiers to include diverse casts. The Obamas have a large interest in Netflix, and no doubt put pressure on as well. It’s doubtful that such productions could get aired if they didn’t obey the DEI rules.
I intended to type more into the previous block. I would never have considered watching the series in the first place. I haven’t even seriously considered subscribing to Netflix. I assumed there would be a lot of political pressure involved, as is normal in Hollywood. I’m done with Hollywood. I devote lots of time to understanding current events, which have much more drama, and actually real and important consequences. Our democracy is at stake this year.
A production can get around those requirements in myriad ways, like with crew members and staff.
If you have Hulu, the mid-2000s show “The Unit” is streaming there. It’s an interesting show about military special ops and their families at home. It gives almost as much time to the wives and kids as it does to the action scenes of the men on assignment. Good ethical issues turn up all the time.
Christ, I can’t watch a single television commercial and respect myself in the morning. Pure fantasy.
I’ve been planning to do an ethnicity/color survey of commercials for a full day and see what the fake demographics are. Haven’t carved out the time yet.
Come on, now! Without commercials, how would you have learned that most married couples in the US now consist of black husband and white wife?
And how would I question that descendants of slaves need reparations given the fabulously housed, attractive, traveled, fed, attired, coifed and automobiled people of color depicted therein?
Actually, one thing I do find interesting is that before George Floyd, McDonald’s filled its television commercials with black people. It really stood out. It was as if they figured, “Hey, white people won’t mind if our commercials are filled with black people, and black people will love us.” I have to believe advertiser focus groups must be evidencing some resentment among the white demographic. At some point, you’d think sales would be adversely affected. But maybe advertisers are content to have thirteen percent of the population buying their stuff.
And isn’t it funny that if you don’t have all black people in a commercial, there are always Asians ready to jump into the breech. And here I thought Asians were oppressors stealing all the slots at prestigious schools and running exploitative bodegas in the South Bronx. I guess you can’t tell the players even with a program.
My wife and her mother watch Bridgerton. The writing always struck me as a 21st-century author trying to sound like Jane Austen and failing miserably. I was willing to overlook the incongruity of British nobility royalty of color in the Regency period. But the anachronisms and other missteps just keep coming.
I’m not even going to dwell on the fact that Hastings is apparently a dukedom while Gloucester merely has an earl. At one point, we see a young bachelor nobleman holding private meetings with prospective brides without any sign of an introduction, let alone a chaperone – very much in the style of modern dating but quite unheard of for well-bred young ladies at the time. Then after each interview, the young man pulls out his pocket-book and crosses out the unsuccessful prospect’s name – in ink. This process, in the real world, would have entailed pulling out an ink bottle on the street and somehow managing pen, ink, and book with two hands while standing.
This kind of carelessness is typical of Shonda’s shows, with similar sloppiness in the representation of law, business, the medical profession, and everything else.
Just about anything represented in Hollywood looks ridiculous to people with real expertise in the subject matter, so allowances must be made. But this stuff is basically one step removed from pulling out your key fob to remotely unlock your horse.
Horses? Didn’t these people have Range Rovers?
My wife watches it. I sometimes sit next to her with a book while she does. I caught the pen thing and commented on it. Now she hunts for details like that herself. On the other hand, she commented of a character who is a low-class boxer (and black), now that’s one character I would believe, traveling Europe while barely making a living while beating the crap out of overconfident young nobles.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Molineaux
George MacDonald Fraser (very entertaining writer, Flashman series) wrote a pretty good historical novel, Black Ajax, about him.
Jack wrote:
Ah. So the series’s purpose is to employ minority actors and to re-write history that we are apparently not permitted to know about because some find reality to painful to endure. That’s enough to attract critical praise from a Times drama critic: funny, I would think her function would be to encourage superior entertainment, not in-your-face social engineering.
You must have just awaken from a five-year nap, Jack. Almost every entertainment endeavor is in-your-face social engineering, and has been since the pandemic. I have lost count of the number of HIV medication commercials I have been forced to endure, keeping in mind that the number of HIV-infected people is vastly smaller than, say, those susceptible to pneumococcal pneumonia or diabetes (not that I am showing any particular love for those medication’s pitches, either). You might think that the drug companies are trying to send some kind of message other than “buy my drugs!”
And of course the Times would praise a transparent exercise in woke casting — failure to do so might trigger their younger employees and force them to fire another editor; you know, like James Bennet.
I personally don’t have too much interest in period shows, so it doesn’t affect me, but I am quite sure I would’ve wondered how so many non-Caucasians got into 19th century England, not to mention into the English aristocracy. I suppose they even have woke peers in this show.
I had been wondering recently how I, a heterosexual man in a 15-year marriage, managed to get targeted for HIV PrEP ads online. At least I know I’m not the only one wondering.
Since the pandemic? No, I’d peg this solidly about 20 years earlier, right on the debut of “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy”.
Not that I’ve ever seen anyting about the show, but simply that you can’t get any more of in-your-face DEI than the title itself.
Disclaimer: I haven’t seen the show and don’t intend to.
Counterpoint: Some people want to watch an alternate history with social drama but without some of the more extreme horrors that humans have inflicted on each other, or the accompanying effects of those horrors on socioeconomic demographics. A work of fiction entertains the audience by showing characters struggling with problems. The creator has the absolute right to pick and choose what settings to use and what problems to depict–indeed, what problems the setting even contains–based on what will entertain the audience.
Racism? That’s just a bummer. It can make the viewer feel associated with people who are oppressed or who oppress others. We already have college courses to handle that. Classism, though? That’s the stuff of forbidden romance and underdog stories, and it lets the viewer identify with whomever they want without feeling too bad about it.
They could have set the show in an alternate universe without references to Earth events, but I assume people want to feel good about recognizing figures and events from their own world’s history. It provides opportunities for hidden jokes and foreshadowing. Maybe they could have made characters that were fictional counterparts of historical figures with similar names?
Regardless, the premise and implementation of a series are determined by how many layers of authenticity the audience wants for their entertainment. If people want social and political intrigue that doesn’t address any heavy economic, military, medical, or religious issues of the time, I don’t see how you can call that wrong.
The movie Clue supposedly took place in the 1950s, but the ethnicity of the black police officer made zero difference to anything and the movie was no less enjoyable for it. If that means that actors with a wider variety of backgrounds can get parts in a wider variety of settings, so much the better. Just think of it like The Mikado, only instead of British people dressing up for a 19th Century Japanese setting, it’s people from any ethnicity dressing up for a 19th Century British setting.
Some people want to watch shows about pirates. Some of those people would be entertained by a hyper-realistic depiction of all the problems that pirates had to deal with and all the problems that they inflicted on others, although many would find that stressful rather than fun. We can therefore expect that some pirate shows won’t contain sexism or sexual violence, and I have no complaints about that.
Personally, I’ve never been interested in social intrigue or romantic hijinks. There is enough selfishness and ongoing deception in the real world. I prefer fiction where characters work together to solve problems. It gives people something to aim for.
If Bridgerton gets a profit, whoop-de-doo for them. If not, then I would say it’s wrong to put political pandering over profit.
Since historical research is easier than ever, and people have made whole careers out of analyzing history movies and TV (YouTube’s History Buffs comes to mind), I think the bar has been raised regarding historical accuracy. Something like Clue or Pirates of the Caribbean can get away with more because of the less-rhan-serious tone. But Bridgerton seems to be playing it more straight, hence the anachronism are more jarring.
I recently finished an anise that sidesteps these challenges nicely. The Apothecary Diaries is set in an un-named country that is clearly modeled after Imperial China, and has the disclaimer before each episode that it’s a work of fiction with no intentional similarity to real people or events. Thus communicates that they are wrapping the setting around the plot, Instead of letting you presume the other way around while they fudge details and sneak social justice messaging.
*anime not anise
The name “Bridgerton” was enough to ensure I’d never watch it.
Like guys – adding “-ton” to anything doesn’t magically whisk a place away to 18th century England. It just sounds like someone who doesn’t know what they’re doing made up a story to set in 18th century England.
Only when I discovered second hand the content of the show did I realize my snap judgment was 100% accurate.
You can add PBS’ Sanditon for additional confirmation. Cobbled up from Austen’s last unfinished novel, it includes a “mulatto” west Indian heiress among the Regency-era Brits …though this character was actually created by Austen.
We watched the Edward James Olmos Battlestar Galactica reboot.
Holy cow it transported me back to the cultural zeitgeist of post-September 11 United States. As young A&M cadets preparing for commissions into an at war Army.
Whew. It brought back some emotions-
The series did a great job capturing the national emotional response to the terror attacks (for the first 2 or 3 seasons before it went the road of all good series trying to milk its fan base past its own prime)
BSG would have been greatly enhanced by suffering the fate of Firefly just after the season that ends with the reveal of the Final Four.